God. Real. Right.

I teach and find biblically indisputable the doctrine of eternal security—once saved always saved. But there are passages which leave even those who agree with the doctrine scratching their heads. John 15 contains one of those passages. However, as with every similarly “offending” passage, the offense is all in the reader, and not in the text. Here are the first six verses of John 15:

1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.  2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.  3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.  4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.  5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.  6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

The confusion in the passage is built on Read the rest of this entry »

In light of the new oversight of tobacco granted to the FDA by legislation passed by both parties in both houses of Congress and signed by President Obama June 22, 2009, I present two poems—generously so labeled. I heard the first from an out-of-control but really creative and interesting fundamentalist preacher in the 1980s. The second, as will be evident by the precipitous decline in quality from the first, is mine.

POEM ONE:

Tobacco is a nasty weed
and from the devil doth proceed
it burns your fingers
stains your clothes
and makes a chimney of your nose

POEM TWO:

Paternalists are a nasty breed
who from the poll booth do proceed
they take your money
buy more roles
and poke your freedom full of holes

Of course, we could avoid the jab of both poems if we’d just accept a little personal responsibility.

To see the real irony, you’ll have to click to read the rest of the story—which is just a picture. But the picture is too irksome for my main page. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an e-mail I received from a listener troubled by a particular passage in the Old Testament. He says “Leviticus” but means “Exodus”. It’s an interesting e-mail because a slight shift in how one phrase is understood completely changes the implications of the passage for the issue of life in the womb. He takes it a way I have heard it taken on other occasions as well. However, as I mention below the letter, I believe both the context and wording itself point in a different direction.

Hi, Dr. Creamer:
I listen to your show almost every day on my way home, and really enjoyed the Christian perspective on various issues of our time. One of the most frequent topics that have been discussed is abortion. While I am staunchly pro-life, I have doubts whether abortion is tantamount to murder. Here is the verse that causes my doubt:

Leviticus 21:22-25 And if men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart, and yet no harm follow; he shall be surely fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if any harm follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (ASB)

A couple of things I observe from these few verses:

1. If a man commits murder, he will receive capital punishment.
2. If a man kills a pregnant woman, he will receive capital punishment.
3. If a man kills only the fetus without killing the pregnant woman, he only needs to pay a fine.

So the only conclusion I can Read the rest of this entry »

Post-moderns attempt to escape the narrow confines of a culture defined by the Enlightenment. That attempt includes moving from pure individualism to community, from propositional claims to narrative, from strict rationalism to contentment with inconsistency, from truth to authenticity, and from integrity to transparency. Every one of those moves is surrounded by dangerous cliffs overlooking jagged valley floors. But that discussion is for another day.

The point here is that by making those moves, post-moderns also end up embracing a type of community which is organic and emergent rather then artificially planned, engineered, and executed. There is something about post-modernity which expects the unexpected, and does not believe that air-tight solutions really have all the holes sealed up. So natural pressures and and the choices of individuals acting as part of a community within those pressures creatively emerge into solutions unforeseen by those living within strict rationalistic guidelines.

Interestingly, conservatives share exactly the Read the rest of this entry »

Among the many praster rem issues brought up in response to my adamantly pro-life position, one is that if abortion is illegal, women will go into back alleys where their health and even lives will be unnecessarily imperiled. Here’s an e-mail I received a few months ago along those lines:

I have a non-Christian friend who is from another country. We were talking about abortion. Her argument for not making it illegal is that in other countries where abortion is illegal women just have unsafe, “back-alley” abortions where the many of the women sustain permanent damage if they live. I know this is how it was in our country years ago. Also, I was reading about women’s abortion stories online and I was saddened by Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court has drawn attention to a controversial appellate court ruling of hers in Ricci v DeStefano. In that case, the inherently unjust (self-contradictory) nature of Title VII applications is obvious. Essentially, a racially neutral exam was nullified by the fact that a white majority happened to perform better on it than their minority counterparts. Such coincidences occur naturally over any significant statistical sample. In some cases minorities would happen to perform better—not because of their minority status, but because of the relevant skills they would bring to the exam. In other cases, like Read the rest of this entry »

I always receive “rebuttal” email or calls when I talk about the importance of preserving life in the womb. Here is an email with comments fairly representative of what I hear all of the time. I don’t think the comments are irrational. But I believe some brief, inline replies can show why I don’t believe they are sound assaults on the pro-life position either.

Dr Creamer,
…[off topic greetings]…
Now I wanted to respond to your subject today. I am pro-life in some ways and pro-choice in other ways. [So here are] The questions Read the rest of this entry »

There are times when what is right or wrong seems so obvious that no explanation is necessary. Those times are misleading. The problem is not always that whether something appears to be right or wrong is inconsistent with the truth, though. Rather, the problem is always whether some explanation, aka justification, is still necessary.

That obviousness, that immediate sense that something is morally laudable, tolerable, or contemptible, can take different forms. But inevitably it collapses into some kind of moral intuitionism. Intuition is simply knowledge without justification. So moral intuition is an awareness of what is right or wrong prior to or separate from justification for the moral judgment in question. For an intuitionist like W.D. Ross, for instance, the awareness that a person ought to keep his obligations is prima facie right. Saying something is known prima facie or intuitively is a lot like saying some truth is self-evident. It really means nothing more than Read the rest of this entry »

(Click here if you’d like to see the pictures but the shockwave slideshow doesn’t display or link to the photo album for you.)
In 2008 a Mallard drake and hen started hanging around our house. In April 2008 and 2009 the hen roosted under an Azalea by a brick planter in front of our door. My family quickly named her Louellen. In 2008 we kept up with her incubation and hatching, but missed the most amazing moment, the exit from the nest and one-time journey to water. But not this year. Having heard the ducklings the night before, and knowing their hen would most likely lead them on their precarious journey at dawn, we rose at 5:30 AM and took turns watching through our front window until she emerged.
The small lake we knew she would lead them to is less than a half mile from our house, as the crow flies. But she is not a crow. And with eleven ducklings in tow, she would not fly. So instead she waddled, walked, waded, paused, ate, rested, and reversed track for three hours around houses, over yards, across streets, under vehicles and signs, through puddles (where the ducklings took their proto-swims), up curbs, into a diversionary koi pond, but finally to the lake itself, where her journey’s work was not completed until she had warned off a too-interested drake.
So let’s say ducks have no consciousness and no worth beyond their utility for humanity. That’s no reason for those of us who do have consciousness and moral value not to be amazed at the beauty of creation and at the protection and guidance one little hen provides her otherwise helpless clutch of followers. Hmm. Helpless followers.
Click on a picture to see it, or the entire album or a slideshow, full-size in Picasa. All photos courtesy of my exhausted and freezing but still beautiful wife.

The storyteller is not Jesus, of course.
And when he heard that there were certain followers of Jesus living in a democratic republic who did not believe they should exercise their democratic prerogatives, he spoke this parable unto them, saying:

There was a certain king whose people suffered miserably under his reign, both directly from his own cruelty and indirectly from that of others in which he refused to intervene. Sadly, his son, heir to the throne, was no better.
But one day his son met Read the rest of this entry »