Category: Apologetics

Christian Symbols – The Saints Symbol

This blog post was first delivered as a spoken sermon during a mid-week Advent series called Christian symbols. Isaiah 7, Romans 5:12-21, and Matthew 1:18-25 was read first.

The third symbol we’re looking at today is the Saints Symbol!  I think that is what most readily comes to mind for most of us Americans – The NFL is one of our national religions, after all. And when it comes to football fans there is no more a religious group than those that root for the New Orleans Saints! 

The symbol however predates the football team. 

This symbol is called the Fleu De Lis.  That is a French name that means Flower of the Lily.  It is a symbol of the French Royalty!  For the French Monarch it is to represent perfection, light, and life.  Louisiana the state and New Orleans the city have deep French roots – hence the symbol for the NFL team. 

The Fleur De Lis is said to be a Lily, while some say it is originally supposed to be an Iris.  Lily’s are white and this flower has a strong connection to Mary – the mother of Jesus our Lord.  Mary in classical art is often depicted with a white Lily in her hand!  This white lily is to represent and signify her purity and chastity. 






There is also a link to the Trinity – Three Petals – that are white for purity and holiness – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

Both of these Christian connections to the Fleur de Lis serve well for us in our Advent season leading up to Christmas. 

The Virgin Mary conceived the Son of God by the Holy Spirit whose Father is God!  Here in the Christmas narrative, the birth of Jesus Christ, we have both images of the Fleur de Lis front and center – The Virgin Mary and the Trinity. 

It is of course through this miraculous, supernatural conception that Jesus, the eternally begotten Son of God entered the world.  His entrance revealed must explicitly that God is Triune.  The revelation of the multi-person nature of God was present in the Old Testament, but revealed directly and plainly in the conception of Jesus and later at his Baptism and later still through Jesus’ public teachings! 

The virgin birth is so central to Christmas – without it – there would be no Christmas.  There would be no Christ.  There would be no Christianity. There would be no salvation.  Because of this great goodness for man that comes through the virgin conception, it is no surprise that the teaching of the virgin conception is under attack. 

Comedians make jokes about the virgin birth – Some girl gets pregnant out of wedlock and goes, “Surprise, God did it.” And heathens laugh.

Religions completely redefine it. I’ll give just one example. Within Mormonism, Elohim (the name Mormons give to God the Father) came down in human form and impregnated the virgin Mary.  She was a virgin who had actual sex with God – thus having a natural conception though be it by God. She was a virgin who lost her virginity to God, and God the Father has a human body in this imaginative retelling.

Sociologists and Psychologists claim the virgin conception is a myth – an ancient and repeating myth.  They point across cultures and see this recurring phenomenon.  One example is that of the Buddha – born in India, it is said that the Buddha came into his mother’s womb as a white elephant during a dream!  However… she wasn’t a virgin.  She was already married and the marriage consummated. 

And a growing number of confessing Christians might shrug and say it doesn’t really matter if it happened as a virgin conception or not.  What matters they will say is that people believe in Jesus, or that might just say that the peace, love, and light that the Christmas narrative symbolizes is what is important. And for the more conservative, yet loosey-goosey Christian, it would be said that what matters most is that he died and rose from the grave for our sins.  However… if we can’t trust and accept the virgin conception because it defies our known reality and functioning of biological procreation then what else must we doubt or remove from Scripture? All of it would be my response and that’s the response we see the doubters [or their kids!] eventually taking.

With God, all things are possible – including a virgin conception and birth. When one embraces the revelation that God created all things out of nothing through his speaking them into existence, it becomes rather child’s play to consider a virgin conception.

Again and again in Scripture, we see that all humans are by nature sinners.  Again and again in Scripture, this inherited sin is credited to Adam!  It is not credited to Adam and Eve, or even to Eve, but it is always credited to Adam, just as we saw in Romans 5. Adam is the one whose sin is to blame for all of us being sinners by nature.  From Adam until Jesus, every man and woman came from a human father and was sinful by nature.  Jesus broke that pattern. 

“Just as Adam produced Woman without a woman, the Virgin produced the Second Adam without a man.”
― Atom Tate

Scripture does not directly say this, but it appears as if the sin gene is passed on through the father’s seed. Jesus had no earthly father.

Jesus’ humanity came from his mother.  Jesus’ divinity was his from the very beginning, though in his assumption of a human nature, God is his eternal Father and he was conceived by the Holy Spirit. This is mind-boggling and Scripture doesn’t answer all of our questions, but again… with God, all things are possible and we believe by faith.

In his names, given to him, we see the importance of the virgin birth. 

Emmanuel – God with us. Of course, he is God with us. He was born of a virgin! He must be God with us.

Jesus – The Lord Saves. Because he is God with us, he is the one who can do what we cannot do for ourselves. He is here to save us from our sins.

Whenever you see the Saints symbol, now you have a lot more to think about besides, “Who dat?” Saints fans will get that.






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the Easter resurrection evidence proves Jesus is God (6-part video Series)

The Easter Resurrection Evidence Proves Jesus Is God is a 6-part series presented by Andy Wrasman at Oak Road Lutheran Church in Lilburn, GA during the Easter Season of the Church in 2021. These videos are screen-cast presentations recorded after each live lecture/discussion.

Part 1 – The New Testament is a Reliable Historical Source: https://youtu.be/OOXU2p6utRs
Part 2 – Jesus Claimed to Be God: https://youtu.be/zbyPbkI__4U
Part 3 – Was Jesus Dead, Buried, and Raised: https://youtu.be/Rkvq1m9cOSI
Part 4 – The Witnesses of the Resurrected Jesus: https://youtu.be/V31IAqeF7zU
Part 5 – Alternative Explanations for the Resurrection Evidence: https://youtu.be/mqMVmc8L4xI
Part 6 – Additional Evidences that Jesus is God: https://youtu.be/uOMWz0XzYaQ

Andy Wrasman2 Comments

The Christian Account of Everything Compared to Naturalism’s Account of Everything

This blog post will compare two worldviews: the Christian account of everything and the account of everything according to naturalism.  These two worldviews will be compared in four categories: view of the Creator, view of creation and Creator-creature relations, view of salvation, and the ethical implications for creation from these previous viewpoints.

Transhumanism

View of the Creator

According to the Christian account of everything, God has always existed; he is eternal and exists in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  All things that now exist came into existence out of nothing through the Father’s spoken word and are held together by his Son.  (Genesis 1-3, John 1:1-4, Colossians 1:15-20, and Hebrews 1:1:-4)  The narrative of Creation in Genesis (as well as the rest of Scripture) indicates that God is a personal being who was very much involved in the creation of all things.  This is indicated by the design and plan of the days of creation, in which God created in a particular order of creating boundary markers within his creation with a progression of creating life within those boundaries for the care and safety of his creatures (Day 1 – Light and Darkness/Day 4 – Heavenly Bodies, Day 2 – Land, Sky, Water/Day 5 – Creatures of the Sky and Water, Day 3 – Vegetation on the Land/Day 6 – Creatures of the Land, including humanity).  He is still very active in his care for his creation.

According to naturalism’s account of everything, all things have arisen purely by blind chance.  Order has come out of chaos.  Life has come from non-life.  Minds have come from mindless matter.  Laws of nature have simply emerged (or have always been) and are assumed to be held in consistency by nature itself.  Nature is all that there has been, all that there is, and all that there ever will be, though this cannot be empirically observed, it is a position held on faith that nature when given enough time will impersonally bring about all that we currently experience through a process named natural selection.  In short there, is no Creator.

View of Creation and Creator-Creature Relations

One’s view of nature is directly tied to one’s view of the Creator.  In the Christian account of everything, nature is best understood as having been created with a proper distinction between it (creation) and the Creator.  The Christian view of creation comes from what God has divinely revealed in his Word about his creation, which is that his creation was originally created – very good!  God’s creation as it stands now is not as God intended it to be.  Through the free-agency of his creatures (first by Satan and his angelic followers and Adam and Eve and now us) who rebelled against God’s will for his creation (the boundary markers of the law that were set out of love for the safety and well-being of all God created), creation itself has been wrecked with sin, death, and evil and stands far from the very good origins of God’s creation.

According to naturalism’s account of everything, all is chaotic and in a state of constant change.  Naturalists who hold true to their account of everything must admit that there is no purpose or meaning in a world that is the product of mindless, random selection, and constant motion.  There is no Creator-creation distinction/relationship; all is nature; all is matter.

View of Salvation

The Christian account of everything has a view of salvation in which God enters into his creation through his Son who became a part of creation through his assumption of a human nature into his personhood.  It is through the Son that God has reconciled all of creation to himself and it is through his Son that one day all things will be restored to God’s original plan (theologian’s debate if this will be a recreation of creation or a new creation, something akin to a Creation 2.0, but it is clear in Scripture that all things will be made new at Christ’s return with a freedom from sin, death, and the devil forever for those who are God’s children through their faith in the Son and his saving work!). (Revelation 21-22)

It is in the view of salvation that naturalists take many divides.  Some naturalists are intellectually honest with their account of all things and recognize that death is the finality of one’s conscience existence; there is no salvation; there is no life after death.  Such naturalists may tend to find a form of salvation in living one’s best life now (YOLO – “You only live once.”).  Anton LaVey’s philosophy of Satanism is an example of this naturalistic view of the world and life and is the prescription for how to best live this life to one’s maximum pleasure.  LaVeyan Satanism is very much hedonistic materialism in which salvation is found in a freedom from social and religious constraints that hinder one from indulging in their carnal desires.

For other naturalists, salvation is found in evolution, an ever occurring progression of improvement (or that is the hoped-in product of nature’s constant state of change – improvement of life).  Some have taken up an active role in this evolutionary progress and have embraced transhumanism – a movement that actively seeks to speed evolution to a new humanity through the joining of human life with technology.  Transhumanism’s highest aim is the implantation of one’s mind into a machine so that one’s consciousness can “live on forever” beyond the limitations of one’s physical body of death.  This is a form of material salvation, though it betrays the fact that one is more than mere physical matter, because transhumanism’s salvation is ultimately found in the preservation of one’s immaterial consciousness.

Ethical Implications

In the Christian account of everything, God is the ultimate standard of morality.  He is good, and it is from God’s eternal state of immutability that we can appeal to an absolute standard of right and wrong for Creation.  For humanity’s ethical role in the grand scheme of all of creation, God has placed us here to be stewards of his creation.  We are to use our God given abilities, including our reasoning capabilities, to care for God’s creation and to cultivate it to its betterment out of love for God and for our neighbors and for our fellow creatures.

In the naturalism’s account of everything, there again is a divide that occurs depending on one’s view of salvation.  For the naturalist who recognizes that there is no salvation; ethics is boiled down to the four-word mantra of Allister Crowley (the Beast) and Anton LaVey, “Do What Thou Wilt.”  There is no God above, no hell below; eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we all die!  For the naturalist who sees salvation in evolution, ethics becomes utilitarian- what best serves survival.  This survival could be centered on the whole of humanity, within a particular collective of humanity, or within the individual.  There is no standard of absolute right and wrong, morality is subjective.

Please visit Contradict Movement for stickers, tracts, shirts, and books.

Andy Wrasman21 Comments

If a Christian seeks a degree in science is that a compromise to his or her Christian faith?

The prompt: A high school student from my church where I am a pastor writes me a letter thanking me for the few years she has been in my church through catechism classes and high school Sunday school classes and such and her letter is expressing her concern that she might be compromising her Christian faith if she pursues a degree in biology, geology, or astronomy.  I am to write her a letter back. 

The following is my reply to this prompt.

Science_300
This image was drawn by Danny Martinez and appears in my book, Contradict – They Can’t All Be True, as an image to accompany a section addressing Darwinian Evolution. 

Dear Eve,

The Lord be with you.

Your participation and partnership in the catechism classes and throughout all of the many church events and services over the past few years have been a blessing for me.  Before becoming a pastor, I was a teacher, and one of the aspects that I found disappointing as a teacher was that after having students for a single year as a senior, I’d rarely see them or have any meaningful on-going relationship after high school graduation with them.   Being able to interact with dedicated students like you who are concerned with growing in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior and how that relates to daily living in holiness and godliness beyond high school into further stages of life was one of the huge draws for me in becoming a pastor.  So, I am so grateful that you are coming to me with this question and I look forward to being your pastor throughout your college years and maybe even beyond if you stay a member at Grace Lutheran Church, but even if you don’t, I’ll always be here for you to tend to such thoughtful questions that deserve the full attention of the Church’s care and counsel.

What you have presented is a typical concern, or area of contention, that is generally perceived to exist between the interaction between religion and science.  Often times, there is an unspoken assumption in our culture that if people are religious, they must be anti-scientific, and that if people are scientific, they must be anti-religious.  For Christianity in particular, this is a false dichotomy – this is not an either/or predicament – there is in fact a harmony that can be reached between being a Christian and being in full support and engagement of the scientific enterprise.  This harmony is properly held or destroyed depending on how a person defines science, or better put, how a person uses science, or if a person properly recognizes the limitations of science or not.

I noticed in your letter that you said you are drawn to pursuing a degree in science because you have been drawn to learning about the world through science.  When science is taken as a particular systematic method of understanding and getting around the world, it is a great means, or resource, for the Christian to serve his or her neighbor.  It is through such systematic exploration of God’s creation that many great advancements in technology, communication, travel, medicine, hygiene, ecology, food services, and so many other fields have been achieved that have made it easier for us to care for our neighbors as well as the rest of God’s creatures entrusted to us.  Many Christians have played major roles in such advancements and good applications of science, and many of them have vocally contributed their discoveries and work to the glory of God, giving thanks to him for their reasoning abilities and their specific opportunities afforded them in their particular fields of science.  I can gladly provide such names of scientists and their achievements to you if you need help finding them.

The compromise of your Christian faith would come if you choose to approach science not as a particular systematic method of understanding and getting around the world, but as the definitive systematic method of doing such, which would mean that science is taken up as being the ultimate means to account for all things.[1]  Such an approach to science has recently been coined as scientism.  It grants science the means to do which science does not have the means to do.  Let me explain.

Science as a particular systematic method of understanding and getting around the world, such as with the scientific method (observation, question, hypothesis, repeatable and observable experimentation, data analysis, and shared results), is limited to gaining knowledge through tests that can be observed and repeated.  Of course there is not a possible or conceivable, much less observable or repeatable experiment that can be conducted to test the existence of God.  In this way, God has been bracketed out of science.  Yet, at the same time adherents of scientism have allowed science to answer questions that too cannot have an observable and repeatable test for falsifiability and verification, such as the origins of the universe and life.  Such metaphysical inquiries are simply outside the bounds of the scientific method, as is the existence of God, but practitioners of scientism fail to see the error in their inconsistent application of science when they use science to account for the universe while denying the knowledge of the existence of God.

The error continues in that most of life’s most important realities can’t be classified as falsifiable through the scientific method, such as love and moral ethics, nor observed, such as the gravitational pull that keeps us safely planted on this earth’s surface.  Other methods of discerning scientia (the Latin word for knowledge) must be utilized to know such things.

The Christian knows that God has created all things visible and invisible.  The Christian has a story that accounts for everything, and within this story, humanity was created as God’s image-bearers (representatives of God) in God’s creation.  In this bestowed position of dominion and stewardship over God’s creation, we have been endowed with capabilities of reason, morality, and relational capabilities that the rest of God’s creatures simply do not and cannot possess.  God has tasked us to use our God-given reason to his glory in service to our neighbors.  As such, we should expect Christians to be excited about exploring and understanding God’s created world, and the Bible in fact exhorts us to such endeavors with the abilities and resources that have been given to us for the purpose of loving and serving our neighbor.

The Christian who is a scientist knows that reason and science are limited to a particular realm of knowledge, namely our physical sphere of life in God’s creation.  We understand that our reason and scientific explorations have their limitations, just as our faith in Christ has its limitations.  In our faith, our knowledge of the Lord and his will is limited to what he has directly revealed to us in the Bible.  We understand that our faith is a gift from the Lord that pertains to our subjective relationship to God in our right standing before him, whereas our reason is a gift from the Lord that pertains to our relationship with the world around us, and of course our reason serves us in understanding God’s revelation to us (his revelation that comes to us both through what he has created and through his direct revelation of himself in Christ and his Word).

It’s also reassuring to know that the modern scientific enterprise emerged within the matrix of Christian civilization in Europe in the high middle ages, and that the founding fathers of modern science were Christians.  The Christian account of everything offered the necessary presuppositions for the scientific method to emerge in that particular time and place – such as viewing the world as a distinct, objective reality that is intelligible and held together by the uniform laws held in place by its immutable Creator!  Such a view of everything flew in the face of the belief systems that dominated other great civilizations that were incapable of birthing the scientific method due to their presuppositions of the world that actively resist a scientific engagement of the physical world, such as pantheism (who is going to experiment on creation – that’d be cutting up and manipulating God – that’s bad karma), reincarnation (time is cyclical – which offers no grounds for exploring cause and effect relationships that exist in a purely linear view of time), unpredictable gods whose emotions and whims impacted the world in drastic ways (this destroys consistent laws of nature that justify the consistent results of repeatable testing), astronomy (when the stars determine all things – who is motivated to understand the world?), and an overall rejection of nature ( as found in Platonic dualism, Gnosticism, and Hinduism’s illusionary view of the world).  And don’t let anyone tell you that an atheistic worldview offers the necessary presuppositions about the world for the scientific method to work – a chaotic, random world of chance that is only matter and void of meaning does not spur one on to conduct the scientific method.  Atheists must borrow – no steal! – from the Christian worldview to assume a world of order, regularity, purpose, and a proper view of mankind’s faculties to justify the scientific method as being a worthy endeavor (thus they are being inconsistent in their confessed view of reality and their scientific endeavors).[2]

In short, Eve, you can be a Christian and a scientist without compromising your Christian faith.  The challenge will be maintaining the proper harmony between reason and faith, as well keeping a right recognition of the tension between the two and their limitations.

I hope this answer is helpful to you.
Peace in Christ,
Andy

[1] I’m drawing this distinction and these definitions straight out of Dr. Joel Okamoto’s article, “God, the Gospel, and Modern Science: Reflections on the Church’s Witness and Message in a Scientific Age,” published in Lutheran Mission Matters, Volume XXIV, No. 3 (Issue 49) November 2016.

[2] This entire paragraph is my summary of Kenneth Samples’ Chapter 14 of Without Doubt, which is entitled “Aren’t Christianity and Science Enemies?”

Contradict Movement (Stickers, Tract, and Books): www.contradictmovement.org
Andy Wrasman’s Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/razwrasman
Reconnect Podcast: https://andywrasman.com/category/reconnect-podcast/

Andy Wrasman1 Comment