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Costly Grace
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who was banned from preaching by the Gestapo. But in 1937 he had written in his classic work The Cost of Discipleship:
Suffering, then, is the badge of true discipleship… Luther reckoned suffering among the marks of the true church, and one of the memoranda drawn up in preparation for the Augsburg Confession similarly defines the church as the community of those “who are persecuted and martyred for the Gospel’s sake.”… Discipleship means allegiance to the suffering Christ, and it is therefore not at all surprising that Christians should be called upon to suffer. In fact, it is a joy and a token of His grace.
It is perhaps not a surprise to discover that in 1945, after imprisonment in a series of concentration camps, he was hanged by the Nazis. Ten years later, the camp doctor wrote “In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
Continue reading ‘Destined for persecution (part 2)’
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I need to lay my cards on the table right at the outset. As far as I know I have never been persecuted for being a Christian. Certainly there have been occasions where ‘friends’ have made fun of me. Undoubtedly there have been times when my Christian faith has caused me to be excluded from some activity or opportunity. But
persecuted? Not yet.
And that, frankly, is quite remarkable. The Christian heritage that we have enjoyed in Britain for centuries has kept the vast majority of us shielded from the truth which most of the rest of the world knows all too well. The persecution of Christians is a normal state of affairs.
I say all this because there is an increasingly realisation that the privileges that we have enjoyed for so long are beginning to come to an end. Even in this country there have been recent occasions where Christians have lost their jobs simply for living out their Christian convictions. There have even been those arrested and prosecuted for doing what you and I believe the Bible commands us to do.
Continue reading ‘Destined for persecution’
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We seem to be in one of those anti-Christian phases that the UK media goes through every now and again. (Not that they are ever pro-Christian, of course, but I think you know what I mean.) First there is David Starkey’s Who Killed Christianity? on Radio 4. Although each programme is mercifully only 15 minutes long, it has already raised my hackles and we’re only halfway through the four-part series. What serious contribution to theology does an historial and expert on the constitution think he can make? And I thought I was self-opinionated.
Perhaps more serious is the continuation of Richard Dawkins all-out assault on God. Channel4 tell us that in His latest TV programme he “describes God as the most unpleasant fictional character of all and launches a wholehearted attack on religion as the cause for much of the pain and suffering in the world.” So much for fair play, then. But what disturbs me most about Dawkins’ rant is not his bad theology, it’s his bad science. Dawkins is an evolutionary-biologist, and for him science is everything. Here’s a quote from his own website:
Either there is evidence for a god (in which case you would not “accept the scientific account of reality” because the scientific account of reality would have been found wanting. That is what evidence would mean).
His point there is simple: You cannot prove that God is (so He cannot exist), and the scientific account of reality has not been found wanting (so you can trust that). It’s clear Dawkins doesn’t know God. It’s clear too, he doesn’t know his science. Science can’t (and probably will never) actually explain very much at all. The more you find out, the more you realise you do not know. And as physics in particular advances, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that this is a great deal that is actually unknowable.
Continue reading ‘God and Quantumn Mechanics’
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