Dave Rubin & Frank Turek Breakthrough Dialogue on Atheism and Christianity

There are indications that society is waking up to transcendent truth. Dave Rubin, former comedian and politically conservative commentator, hosted Frank Turek, a most articulate Christian apologist, on his LOCALS podcast today. It was a breakthrough dialogue.  If you don't know, Dave has changed from being a progressive liberal to staunch conservative over the course of this career. He's respected in politically conservative circles for his determination to engage people of all political walks in respective dialogue on controversial topics. He toured with Jordan Peterson during Jordan's first worldwide book tour for "12 Rules for Life." So, this conversation is fascinating to watch and listen to, especially since Dave is gay...although you wouldn't know it unless you heard him say so, which he rarely does. I suspect that when he hosts a Christian there's a prior agreement to steer clear of Dave's so-called "marriage" for the sake of civility. The consequence is a respectful dialogue about everything else—values, history, politics, culture, and religion—watched by many of his nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers.  

Mathematical Challenges to Darwin's Theory of Evolution

 I have long been a proponent of how Nature and the Bible are in complete agreement. That mindset has been with me since high school, and was reinforced in college where I majored in science (Physics) but did better in the few Philosophy classes I took. I have argued like the Psalmists that the "Heavens declare the glory of God..." and that the Bible came later. We don't need the Bible to prove there's a God. The evidence that there exists a God beyond our physical and psychological reality who created what we sense is immense. All one needs to do is look at the stars in the heavenlies, a bee hovering over a dandelion, or examine how your thumb works...or the most astonishing evidence—the complexity of our DNA. When atheists claims there is no God they reveals the depth of their ignorance and height of arrogance. The atheists's knowledge of the universe and reality is so microscopic they have no foundation for claiming omniscience about the universe and reality. The atheist claim, rather, is fundamentally a contradiction, unless their definition of a god requires a materialistic entity, in which case I could not worship such a god and I would agree with the atheist—there is no such god that fits within the realm of materialism...my God created all that is material and therefore cannot be part of it.

Regardless, here is a discussion between four men, which I can only celebrate (the men and the discussion). It examines the mathematical probabilities of the atheistic claim that there is no God, and that reality is a fluke of "nature."  I'm glad to see YouTube has it registered with over 2 million views as of this date. 

My Philosophy for Life

Philosophy and Psychology cross paths when they attempt to give identity and purpose to one's existence. Our Philosophy can be how we understand and relate to reality externally. Psychology is can be how we understand and relate to reality internally. 

For a contented and satisfying existence we need to understand reality (both external to us, and internal to us) in terms of Natural laws, so that we embrace values and act consistent with the way the universe works.

A very simple but true example involves our relationship to the physical phenomenon known as gravity. 

Philosophically we can accept or reject gravity's existence. If we reject gravity we will ignore the practical laws of living with gravity, and we will walk off a cliff, fall, and kill ourselves. If we accept it, we will be aware of the practical laws of living with gravity and stay away from the edge of cliffs. 

Psychologically we can find gravity assuring or threatening. If we understand gravity as our ally, we will be able to walk, jump, sit, and lie down with confidence and be at peace with gravity's attributes. But if we understand gravity as a threat, we are likely to curl up into a fetal ball and become, literally, useless, and die of inaction.

A "philosophy of life" can embrace both outward and inward perspectives of who we are and what we are to be. In our sophisticated, modern world, there are many different models of how to understand human life. There are religious models: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. There are psychological models: Maslow's hierarch of needs, Freud's theory of the ego and id, Jung's Analytical concepts, and Jordan Peterson's Rules for Life. There is also the work of the Greek physician Hippocrates who describes what we call today as the Four Temperaments: Phlegmatic, Choleric, Sanguine, and Melancholic; an outcome of that ancient work is also famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

All of these are ways of understanding reality and how we might, through our free will, balance our lives to find purpose and satisfaction in our thinking and our actions. And studying about all of these, or some of them at least, can help us understand how to think and discuss ways of looking at the world around us, and understanding ourselves inwardly. For example, as a teenager, I wanted to understand both the world and myself, so I spent several weeks one summer categorizing the premises in the Book of Proverbs: "A wise man will hear, and will increase in learning." "The fool has said in his heart there is no God." "If sinners entice thee, consent thou not." etc. 

Philosophically and psychologically, I was raised as an Evangelical Christian. Today I'm a Catholic Christian, and by association I have a lot of respect of Judaism. One concept in Judaism revolves around three actions: Study, Work, and Doing Good for Others. In Catholic Christianity there are the 7 Corporal Works of Mercy, and the 7 Spiritual Works of Mercy. In the Pauline Epistles we find the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit. In the teachings of Jesus, we find the Beatitudes. 

All those things are focused on others, not yourself. The epitome of being others centered is the life and death of Jesus Christ. Psychological research reveals that people who help others are the happiest. People that focus on themselves to the exclusion of others lead unhappy lives at best, or at worse end up killing themselves. There is no transcendence in their lives, they are lost looking for meaning in their very limited sphere.  Thus, knowledge of all these models is helpful. But if you turn it all inward, it is destructive. Life is not about us, but rather about others. If we constantly turn inward, we become selfish and self-centered. 

My advice is to develop a Personal Life Mission Statement that is other's centered. Laurie Beth Jones' THE PATH is the best resource for developing such a statement.  I worked on mine for over a month. It is this:

To discover and promote divine truth to those within my sphere of influence.

It’s short, pity, and applies to everything I do, or it eliminates things I think about doing but shouldn’t if I want my actions to have purpose. If my values and actions do not benefit someone else, then they won’t benefit me and my mission or purpose. 

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Basic Christianity: Facts-Evidences-Reasons

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FRONT 33 chapters/lectures. Full Table of Contents at the website. 50+ color photographs of the Greek and Roman culture Christianity overcame. Trim size 8.5 x 8.5. 374 pages

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MIRACLES - JUST IN TIME

During the Shutdown, here's a good edifying, educational, mind-expanding book to read. 

This is an excerpt from Chapter 13: Are Miracles a Means to An End? from our new book BASIC CHRISTIANITY: Facts-Evidences-Reasons, AVAILABLE HERE. 

Miracles - A Significant Adaptation of Means

The regularity of nature, what we call the laws of nature, is God doing the same thing in the same way, most of the time, day-after-day. God does this in order to provide a stable environment so we can develop character and responsibility. Without the stability of nature, if nature was really random, we could never plan what we were to do the next day and would too easily give up telling others what time we'd be over to help them, because time would be unpredictable.

We need to think of the universe and its laws as designed to run in a way to achieve God's purpose, of showing us love. Thus, the universe and its laws are the means to an end, where the end is God revealing his love to us by giving us a stable world in which to live and grow. But sometimes we need an extra dose of love, and so we are confronted with miracles, whether through answered prayer, or just an angel who swoops down and saves us from disaster. It is from these moments that Dr. Walters invokes Dr. Elton Trueblood's definition of a miracle as "a significant adaptation of means." That is, God adapted natural laws significantly in some way to help us. God significantly adapted the laws of the universe: the means to his end of loving us.

The point is, ordinarily the means that God uses to do things are the means we know about all the time. But, if he wishes, he may make a significant adaptation of means and then there occurs something which we're not accustomed, to which we do not find it possible to explain by ordinary cause and effect, and which we would call a miracle.

Now, this idea, that God controls, and manipulates the universe for his own purposes, leads to three implications for our life.

------begin lecture excerpt from Dr. Walter's book Basic Christianity chapter 13------

Three Implications

1. Things Don't Happen by Accident to the Christian

Lecture from Dr. Stan Walters

One of them is this. There is a sense in which things do not happen by accident.  When he was a university student at Oxford the late William Temple (1881-1944), whom some people consider the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century, wrote a letter home to his parents in which he discussed a particular examination that he had taken. Temple wrote that he'd done rather well on the exam, better it seems than he had expected to do. And he wrote, "I was going to blaspheme and say 'Lucky'."

Now, why should Temple say that "Lucky" is blasphemy?  Because lucky implies there isn't any pattern. There isn't any purpose. It is random that things just happen without being part of some overarching purpose. And the Christian cannot say that, ...not and believe in the God whom he meets in the Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. Because the God whom we meet in the Scriptures is in charge of things.

It is true that the universe operates according to patterns describable by us most of the time.  But from the Biblical point of view, God is somehow in these operations working out his eternal purposes. And to say "Lucky" would be to say there are some things that God wasn't in, they just happened. And that would be saying the Creator is not the Creator. He's only a part of this operation. And it would reduce the Creator to the level of the creature. We ought to take this more seriously. Things don't happen by accident to the Christian.

2. The Universe is Run by the Eternal Purpose of God

Secondly, there's an interesting implication, for me at least, in this about prayer. When I first began to see the ideas that I've been trying to develop for you in these periods, it made prayer much easier for me, because I saw that in praying what I really had to do was something like this:

Oh God, here is a particular need.  Will you use any means necessary to meet that need? You pick the means Lord. And you know what it's going to take to meet that need. Devise and use whatever means are necessary to meet that need.

I think it's helpful to our prayer life to see that the universe is run basically by the eternal purpose of God and not by a cast iron set of causes and effects.

3. Christians Need to be Open to the Novel and Unexpected

The third implication is that Christian people are required to have a very great openness to the novel and the unexpected. You don't know when it may suit God's purposes to vary things just a little. And therefore, the novel may occur. The resurrection of Christ was an extraordinary novelty for which any kind of meaningful precedent was almost totally lacking. And yet we think that it happened. God is never bound by precedent. And in your life and mine and in those communities of Christian persons which are nearly everywhere in this world, there ought to be great openness so that God may do what he wishes to do even if it is something just a little different than we're used to.

------- End of lecture excerpt -------

A "miracle" in practice and lecture summary.

In a recent post I shared a picture of a large tree limb that had fallen on my wife's car. It destroyed the passenger door, the windshield and frame, an "A" pillar, and most notably the structural steel in the roof panel.  Pam had just acquired the car from her elderly father, and it was special, although it had modestly high mileage. And while it was in generally good shape with no rust (we live in Michigan where they use salt on the roads in winter), we had already put over $1,000 in repairs just in the last few weeks. She loved the car, but I was worried a bit about the future expense of keeping it up.

Unfortunately, AAA Auto Insurance had to "total" the car because the parts were no longer available and it could not be repaired. We were both devastated. We could not afford another car payment, and Pam needed the car for her ministry at church and several other families.

What was interesting about the event was where she had parked the car just minutes before the limb fell (during a wind storm). It was in our driveway, but about six feet further away from where she normally parked it. And that was because while doing some yard work I had temporarily placed something in her side of the garage preventing the car's entry. But, had she parked the car in her normal spot in the driveway, the limb would have missed the car entirely. The circumstances leading up to it, and the limb's falling on her car, were both novel and unexpected. But was it a miracle?

At first, we would never have called it that. But as time went on and as we prayed for wisdom, several things occurred to Pam's mind about the car and its demise. They were incidental things, but they related to two people she was always praying for. Were these people connected directly with the car? Not really. But the car being totaled gave Pam fresh ideas of how to pray for those individuals and how Pam's life and theirs were related. But what to do, we were in a quandary. We expected a settlement check form AAA, but it wouldn't be enough to get another car, and we were already cash strapped.

Then, not thinking of the unexpected, a few days later AAA made a cash settlement for the car in an amount that was far more than what we thought the car was worth. And with a small savings Pam had, it appears she will be just able to acquire a newer car, with fewer miles, that will allow her to continue her ministry in a less expensive manner. Much less, in fact. And, had she tried to trade in the car, she would not have gotten as much for it, and getting a newer car, with less miles, would have been out of the question. So, the limb falling oddly on the car was a blessing? Who would have guessed that?

Pam and I pray together each morning and evening, in addition to our private time of Bible reading and prayer. We try to keep our faith strong, but there are times, like this, that test us. Then, as this car and tree limb situation was unfolding, I was editing these chapters, in Dr. Walter's book, on miracles, and came to the section I've shared with you above. While we do not know the real reason why her car was totaled, the oddity of how it happened brings the implications noted above into focus for us.

1. Things don't happen by accident for the Christian.

2. The Universe is Run by the Eternal Purpose of God.

3. Christians Need to be Open to the Novel and Unexpected.

—Stan Williams

Basic Christianity Documentary (WATCH BELOW)

In an effort to promote Dr. Stan Walters's book, Basic Christianity: Facts-Evidences-Reasons, (available here: http://www.stanwilliams.com/NINEVEHSCROSSING/BCInfo.php) I ventured into a video recording of me presenting Dr. Walters's Lecture 4: Getting Information About God.  (I mean our initials are the same "SDW" as are our first two names, Stanley David...) Now, I say that with a bit of sarcasm and deep respect for my mentor, Dr. Walters.  I do wish he was still on the lecture circuit, because his stage presence was very engaging, as the writer of the book's Foreword, Dwight Gregory so well articulates in his Foreword and in the video testimonial on the book's website. So, because I am not the assured, confident, and posed Walters, I have supplemented his words (from the edited book) with lots of graphics and pictures.

Now, that is not really why I added the images and animation. I did such to make Walters's words accessible to the huge audience of young people who don't read so well, or who would have trouble following the logic without visual support. A lot has changed in communication media in our culture since these lectures were last presented by Master Walters in 1968.  I guess, I also added all the visuals and music because when he delivered these, as good as he was, I was a very poor student. It still is hard, although not as much, to listen to a sophisticated talk and understand much of what is being said. I prefer books which allow me without cost, except for time, to re-read a sentence or paragraph many times in order to grasp its meaning. Videos are good too because I can play a section over and over until I get the joke—thick I am.

Also, the meaning behind Dr. Walters' talks are significant in the realm of Christian apologetics. They were very helpful to me, and I want them to be helpful to others.  So, I hope you enjoy the video documentary of his talk (presented by me with the help of Final Cut Pro and a bunch of technology) and remember, you can play a section over and over until it puts you to sleep.

I doubt that I will do more than this one lecture. It is taking a long time, and it's not earning my any money to pay for the software updates. (smile)

Blessings,

Stanley D. Williams

Greenville University to Accept Donations for Printing of BASIC CHRISTIANITY Lecture Series

Dear Friends,

Greenville University has offered to collect TAX DEDUCTIBLE donations for the overseas printing of: BASIC CHRISTIANITY.  

We're well on our way with $4,500 of the $12,500 needed donated.  This will dramatically lower the price of the hard copy editions for worldwide distribution.

This book will bolster the faith of many minds, if we can get it printed and distributed, like we have with thousands of other books and DVDs around the world. 

If you want to help, write out a check to: "Greenville University," and on the Memo Line write "BC Printing Sponsor." 

Mail your check to:

Office of Advancement 

Greenville University

315 E. Main

Greenville, IL  62246 USA.  

This opportunity is not explained in the video below, since it just happened. 

If you want to SPONSOR the printing and get your name, website, and logo advertised inside the book, download this PDF FILE and follow the instructions. 

Hardback copies are available (now) for those of you who can't wait for us to get the price down. And PDFs can be downloaded within minutes. Dive in. This is rich, faith building material. What are we talking about? CLICK HERE.

A few of the chapter titles ( great for homeschooling):

• Thinking for Yourself in Religion
• Getting Information About God
• By Word of Mouth
• Source Criticism & The Synoptic Gospels
• Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel
• Outside Independent Evidences
• The Resurrection of Jesus
• Can Miracles Happen at All?
• Arguments Explaining Miracles
• Text Criticism
• Canon of the New Testament
• The Geopolitical Background of Mark
• Greek and Roman Civilization
• What Made Jesus Different
• Jesus's Power
• Jesus's Last Week and Pilate
• Right vs. Wrong as Evidence of God
• Concepts of God
• Why Believe in God (Parts 1 & 2)
• The Character of Christ
• Sin in the New Testament
• What is a Christian?

and more

Please help us change the culture with this beautiful book filled with goodness and truth. 

Dr. Stan Williams

Christianity: Facts-Evidences-Reasons

CLICK HERE for more Information

We are in the final throes of proofing our up-coming book, which we have retitled, yet again to more closely match the content—CHRISTIANITY: FACTS-EVIDENCES-REASONS — 33 college level lectures by ancient language scholar Dr. Stan Walters from Yale, Princeton and Oxford. 

The more we read these lectures, the more convinced we are, and excited we become about the exemplary material it contains for Christians and Christian apologists. 

So, we're going to tease you with a few passages and quotes.

From Lecture No. 1: Goals of the Course

One of the things that gets omitted even in the best public high school programs is the development of a sophisticated understanding of religion. There are good and sufficient reasons for it. But this means that even though you may arrive at college with something like an adult understanding of many facets of life’s experiences, most of us come to college with what is basically a grade school or a junior high school or a Sunday school understanding of the Christian faith. This has a lot of disadvantages, from my point of view. For one thing, all the time that you are learning new concepts, new ideas in matters of science, history, literature, and language, you are not learning anything new in the matter of religion. Everybody knows that grade school science has to give way to a high school understanding, and, in turn, high school understandings, say, in science, have to give way to college-level understandings. 

Wouldn’t this also be true of our understanding of the Christian faith? It seems to me a kind of demoralizing thing when a person is learning new and perhaps exciting ways of looking at everything except religion—and religion he keeps on looking at in the same old Sunday school way. Now that’s nothing against Sunday school. It’s nothing against grade-school understanding. That’s fine for grade-school people. When you become a college person, you want to develop a college-level understanding of the Christian faith.  

Evidence Based 

This is one of the reasons that I try to center the class on evidences rather than on dogmatic affirmations. What you can’t explain to a child you may be able to explain to a college student. I will talk to you differently than I talk to my boy. I would like to explain some things to him and go in deeper than I do, but I know that he can’t follow those things, and he has to take my word for a lot of things.  

Well, part of developing an adult-level understanding of the Christian faith will involve us, then, in the consideration of the evidences for the plausibility of the Christian faith. And this, I hope, will help your religious thinking and, your theological thinking, keep pace with the development of your scientific and other thinking. 

Basic Christianity Lecture 1 - The Goals of this Course

Lectures on the Evidence for the Authenticity of BASIC CHRISTIANITY by Stanley D. Walters, Ph. D. is a book I'm editing for distribution by Nineveh's Crossing or a more prominent publisher.

My wife, Pam, and I had the  privilege of sitting under Dr. Walters at Greenville College (now Greenville University) in 1967 and 1968 for a course he designed titled BASIC CHRISTIANITY.  His influence on our Christian faith was remarkable. And although he was "technically" evangelical and an ordained Free Methodist minister, Pam and I credit him as a significant reason we converted to Catholicism.

There are 32 lectures that are currently being edited, from recordings I made in 1968, the last time he delivered the course. Walters academic pedigree began at Greenville College where he earned his B.A. He then went on to Asbury Theological Seminary (B.D.), Princeton (Th.M.), and Yale (Ph.D.) where is studied archeology and translated cuneiform tablets.

Although Greenville was associated with the evangelical Methodist tradition (and Armenian in theology), Walters had a liking for the discipline displayed by Anglican theologians like John Stott, C.S. Lewis, and other British thinkers and historians such as Plymouth Brethern F. F. Bruce and Quaker  Elton Trueblood. To further broaden his theological resume he spend years after academia ministering in Presbyterian (Calvinism) parishes in Canada and the U.S.

As will be evident from the lectures, he was not a "faith alone" advocate, but lectured heavily in favor of "faith and reason." He preferred critical evidence to blind ideology. The training we received to think critically about religious ideas and our faith focused on the logical, historical, and personal religious experience as empirical evidence that verified Scripture revelation. Such evidence, we discovered, could not be denied and could be repeated.

So, without more at this point, the following posts will offer up excerpts of the lectures to tease you enough that you'll want to buy the book when it comes out...and when that is we have no idea. There's much work that remains.  Except the first few lectures I may post in their entirety. (Stan Williams)


Lecture 1 - The Goals of This Course
Stanley D. Walters, Ph. D.
February 1968 - Greenville College

The BOP Method

Now there are different ways of convincing people that certain things are so. There is the “BOP” method which is often employed here. As a result of the application of this technique, you end up believing things which are completely unrealistic. Further, you end up...

MIRACLES: A Significant Adaptation of Means

I'm editing a book of lectures on BASIC CHRISTIANITY delivered by Dr. Stan Walters over 50 years ago. Walters was an academic fellow from Yale and Oxford, a Biblical scholar and part-time archeologist who taught for years in Christian and secular universities. Imagine a Christian Indiana Jones.

The lectures are unique because they are based on the premise that Christianity is evidence based, not just faith alone. Walters believed that without factual, historical and logical evidence, Christianity is too easily discredited as the fanciful imagination of fanatics. Without reason and evidence, one could believe in anything, and there are many other fanciful religions and versions of Christianity that are not based on facts or logic.

Dr. Stan Walters lectures at Greenville College in 1968

His lectures so captured my imagination that while still in college I obtained permission to record an entire semester of his course on Basic Christianity from the college radio station (WGRN) where I was production manger.

 Little did I know it would be the last time he taught the course. (There's a chapter about Dr. Walters in my memoir, Growing Up Christian, and his thinking about the evidence in Christianity informed my web-series The Logical Case for Catholicism.) Recently, I was able to transfer the tapes to digital format and transcribe them. And with his permission, he lives not far from us, I'm now in the midst of editing the lectures and hopefully next year will release them as a book.

Today, I edited the last of three lectures on MIRACLES. They are astonishing, and so I wanted to share with you an excerpt from the conclusion. Here it is.

------- Start of lecture excerpt -------

Miracles - A Significant Adaptation of Means

The regularity of nature, what we call the laws of nature, is God doing the same thing in the same way, most of the time, day-after-day. God does this in order to provide a stable environment so we can develop character and responsibility. Without the stability of nature, if nature was really random, we could never plan what we were to do the next day and would too easily give up telling others what time we'd be over to help them, because time would be unpredictable.

We need to think of the universe and its laws as designed to run in a way to achieve God's purpose, of showing us love. Thus, the universe and its laws are the means to an end, where the end is God revealing his love to us by giving us a stable world in which to live and grow. But sometimes we need an extra dose of love, and so we are confronted with miracles, whether through answered prayer, or just an angel who swoops down and saves us from disaster. It is from these moments that Dr. Walters invokes Dr. Elton Trueblood's definition of a miracle as "a significant adaptation of means." That is, God adapted natural laws significantly in some way to help us. God significantly adapted the laws of the universe: the means to his end of loving us.

The point is, ordinarily the means that God uses to do things are the means we know about all the time. But, if he wishes, he may make a significant adaptation of means and then there occurs something which we're not accustomed, to which we do not find it possible to explain by ordinary cause and effect, and which we would call a miracle.

Now, this idea, that God controls, and manipulates the universe for his own purposes, leads to three implications for our life.
Three Implications

1. Things Don't Happen by Accident to the Christian

One of them is this. There is a sense in which things do not happen by accident.  When he was a university student at Oxford the late William Temple (1881-1944), whom some people consider the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century, wrote a letter home to his parents in which he discussed a particular examination that he had taken. Temple wrote that he'd done rather well on the exam, better it seems than he had expected to do. And he wrote, "I was going to blaspheme and say 'Lucky'."

Now, why should Temple say that "Lucky" is blasphemy?  Because lucky implies there isn't any pattern. There isn't any purpose. It is random that things just happen without being part of some overarching purpose. And the Christian cannot say that, ...not and believe in the God whom he meets in the Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. Because the God whom we meet in the Scriptures is in charge of things.

It is true that the universe operates according to patterns describable by us most of the time.  But from the Biblical point of view, God is somehow in these operations working out his eternal purposes. And to say "Lucky" would be to say there are some things that God wasn't in, they just happened. And that would be saying the Creator is not the Creator. He's only a part of this operation. And it would reduce the Creator to the level of the creature. We ought to take this more seriously. Things don't happen by accident to the Christian.

2. The Universe is Run by the Eternal Purpose of God

Secondly, there's an interesting implication, for me at least, in this about prayer. When I first began to see the ideas that I've been trying to develop for you in these periods, it made prayer much easier for me, because I saw that in praying what I really had to do was something like this:

Oh God, here is a particular need.  Will you use any means necessary to meet that need? You pick the means Lord. And you know what it's going to take to meet that need. Devise and use whatever means are necessary to meet that need.

I think it's helpful to our prayer life to see that the universe is run basically by the eternal purpose of God and not by a cast iron set of causes and effects.

3. Christians Need to be Open to the Novel and Unexpected

The third implication is that Christian people are required to have a very great openness to the novel and the unexpected. You don't know when it may suit God's purposes to vary things just a little. And therefore, the novel may occur. The resurrection of Christ was an extraordinary novelty for which any kind of meaningful precedent was almost totally lacking. And yet we think that it happened. God is never bound by precedent. And in your life and mine and in those communities of Christian persons which are nearly everywhere in this world, there ought to be great openness so that God may do what he wishes to do even if it is something just a little different than we're used to.

------- End of lecture excerpt -------

The Lesson in This Post

In a recent post I shared a picture of a large tree limb that had fallen on my wife's car. It destroyed the passenger door, the windshield and frame, an "A" pillar, and most notably the structural steel in the roof panel.  Pam had just acquired the car from her elderly father, and it was special, although it had modestly high mileage. And while it was in generally good shape with no rust (we live in Michigan where they use salt on the roads in winter), we had already put over $1,000 in repairs just in the last few weeks. She loved the car, but I was worried a bit about the future expense of keeping it up.

Unfortunately, AAA Auto Insurance had to "total" the car because the parts were no longer available and it could not be repaired. We were both devastated. We could not afford another car payment, and Pam needed the car for her ministry at church and several other families.

What was interesting about the event was where she had parked the car just minutes before the limb fell (during a wind storm). It was in our driveway, but about six feet further away from where she normally parked it. And that was because while doing some yard work I had temporarily placed something in her side of the garage preventing the car's entry. But, had she parked the car in her normal spot in the driveway, the limb would have missed the car entirely. The circumstances leading up to it, and the limb's falling on her car, were both novel and unexpected. But was it a miracle?

At first, we would never have called it that. But as time went on and as we prayed for wisdom, several things occurred to Pam's mind about the car and its demise. They were incidental things, but they related to two people she was always praying for. Were these people connected directly with the car? Not really. But the car being totaled gave Pam fresh ideas of how to pray for those individuals and how Pam's life and theirs were related. But what to do, we were in a quandary. We expected a settlement check form AAA, but it wouldn't be enough to get another car, and we were already cash strapped.

Then, not thinking of the unexpected, a few days later AAA made a cash settlement for the car in an amount that was far more than what we thought the car was worth. And with a small savings Pam had, it appears she will be just able to acquire a newer car, with fewer miles, that will allow her to continue her ministry in a less expensive manner. Much less, in fact. And, had she tried to trade in the car, she would not have gotten as much for it, and getting a newer car, with less miles, would have been out of the question. So, the limb falling oddly on the car was a blessing? Who would have guessed that?

Pam and I pray together each morning and evening, in addition to our private time of Bible reading and prayer. We try to keep our faith strong, but there are times, like this, that test us. Then, as this car and tree limb situation was unfolding, I was editing these chapters on miracles, and came to the section I've shared with you above. While we do not know the real reason why her car was totaled, the oddity of how it happened brings the implications noted above into focus for us.

1. Things don't happen by accident for the Christian.

2. The Universe is Run by the Eternal Purpose of God.

3. Christians Need to be Open to the Novel and Unexpected.

Basic Christianity Lectures - New Product Development

Dr. Stan Walters lecturing at Greenville College, 1968. The year book that
year was dedicated to him. He was the class of 1968 class sponsor.

Fifty years ago, in college, I took a course titled BASIC CHRISTIANITY. It was required of all graduating students at Greenville College (now Greenville University). G.C. was then and still is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, an Evangelical denomination.  The course was taught by Princeton fellow,  Dr. Stanley D. Walters. At the time, our first names and initials were the only thing I had in common with this man. He was a scholar, graduated with honors from Princeton (I was lucky to get into college), he read Greek (I was struggling with English slang), he was smart, articulate, and confident (I was the campus AV geek with a ring of keys on my belt and an empty pocket protector.)

If, as an incoming freshman, you were deemed smart, Dr. Walter's class was assigned to you to take the very first semester you were at college. The slightly less than smart students took the class the second semester of their freshman year. The dumb students took the class their first semester of their sophomore year, and the dumbest (lucky-to-be-in-college) students took Walter's class their sophomore year, second semester. That's where I ended up. If I didn't pass this course I would be sent home and the school would keep my parent's money just for their trouble I gave them.

There were three text books for Walter's class, all very small paperbacks, but all written by Anglican scholars from Oxford (the one in England), not the township named Oxford in North Dakota. That the texts for a course in Basic Christianity at an Evangelical college came from Oxford scholars who were Anglican should have been a warning to Greenville's administration. It took them seven years to catch on that Walters was not your the die-hard "faith alone" Christian. In fact, Walter's perchance for Christianity required a great deal of faith and reason, and the Basic Christianity course he designed and taught provided reams of empirical evidence for the authenticity of the faith. This irritated some stalwart administrators and Board members at G.C. who believed that one needed to take Christianity on faith alone and not have to think about it.

But I wanted to think about it. I was a physics major. I liked empirical evidence.  If reason wasn't involved, if evidence wasn't involved, if it was "blind faith" then, it seemed to me, any religious belief system would have sufficed...you could make one up, put on the blinders and believe it. It wouldn't be true, but if "faith alone" was the criteria, who should care?

Thus, it was that Walter's course deeply appealed to me.  Although my liking the course and liking Walters wasn't good enough to earn me anything better than a "C." Remember, they didn't let me take the course until my 4th semester. But I was still captivated. I took voluminous notes, which I will have. I tried reading Lewis, Bruce and Stott, (the three Anglican texts) but I understood little. Yet I kept the notes.

Halfway through the next year a girl I knew from high school transferred to G.C. and we started dating. The first semester she was on campus they made her take Walter's Basic Christianity. She was one of the smart ones, although she transferred in as a sophomore. By now I was working part time at the college radio station and had a ring of keys to the audio books in the lecture halls. I got permission and started to record Walter's lectures. Put them on 4-track tapes at the slow speed. I tried to fit 8 lectures on each 7-inch reel-to-reel but screwed up and recorded over one or two, and for some reason missed a whole week of lectures. But in the end I had 40 lectures.  Last year I rebuilt the 4-track, digitized the lecture to my MacPro, and with the help of Temi.com we've completed the transcription. Now, we're turning them into a book—50 years later. Dr. Walters lives south of me 2-hours and is enjoying reading his lectures from way back when. His daughter, who has since become Catholic, and is the editor of a diocesan newspaper and website, will co-edit the book with me. We are both set on preserving her Dad's "voice" in the text. It's unique.

But that semester, in the Spring of 1968, would be Walter's last year at G.C. After 7 years the authorities finally figured out that he was turning us all into thinking Anglicans, and not devout faith alone Free Methodists. (Ironically, Walters as an ordained F.M. minister.) So, the lectures I captured were the last time he delivered the course. At the end of the semester, as sort of a lame apology for forcing him out, the powers to be let him deliver the last chapel talk of the year. I recorded that, too. It was classic Walters. You can listen to the mp3 and/or download it here. Or, here is a PDF of the printed version. It's formatted for the upcoming book, with wide outer margins. Enjoy.

Oh, and that girl that transferred to G.C. in time to take Dr. Walter's class?  She became my wife. Pam and I have been married 49 years as of August 2018.

FAITH in Action

When Christians say we are saved by "faith alone" (as if 'faith' is simply mental ascent) I'm reminded of two scripture passages that claim otherwise. This is one of them. Faith and Works are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other.

Hebrews 11 (NIV)

 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.  This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. 

By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead. By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.  

What Does That Mean Anyway?

Words taken from the book,
WHAT CATHOLICS REALLY BELIEVE

Dr. Ray Guarendi & Fr. Kevin Fete 

  

 Incarnation

The greatest proof of God's desire to work through the physical world to give us grace, was the Incarnation- God taking on the form of man in Jesus Christ.

Venerate

To pay honor to someone or something, which does not detract from God's glory, but adds to God's glory. Veneration is not "adoration" or "worship" which are activities, within Catholicism, reserved for God alone.

The Great Schism

The formal split between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in 1054.

A "woman" walks into a bathroom...

 (Dr. Stan Williams is on the road for a few weeks. 

This is his daughter, Mrs. April Thrasher, filling in.)

The latest craze of "us versus them" debate seems to be the controversy of transgender people and bathrooms, but it is not. This goes beyond the comfort status of having men in women's bathrooms. It has to do with the fact that any man can dress up as a woman and enter a woman's bathroom. But, there are bathroom stalls for privacy, right? Yes. However, you have to come out and wash your hands at some point, right? I am not saying that transgender people are pedophiles.  But now, the law has given pedophiles a "secret door" to walk through, right into the bathroom with my child.

I read something today that said.  “We have been using public restrooms for years with transgender people and no one has ever had a problem with it until now." I am not concerned about transgender people using bathrooms, I am concerned about

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