Tried With Fire

The majority of my Christian life, 40 years to be precise, was steeped in a form of deeper life/early Keswick/two-tiered salvation. I have friends and family who are still part of this movement whom I love, but I would respectfully but still strongly disagree with their theology. The preachers who taught this view made it abundantly clear that Christ got us in the door, but the rest was up to us. Failure to make the grade, in our particular circle, resulted in not being raptured and enduring outer darkness during the kingdom age. According to author D.M. Panton (1870-1955), the rapture was God's judgment of both believers and nonbelievers. Thus Christians will be left behind if they aren't spiritual enough. Here's a quote from Panton's book as evidence: For it is the bride, and not the bridegroom, that contributes the trousseau of marriage readiness, and as she provides it out of the resources of her father, so "His wife hath made herself  READY: and it was gi...

What everybody believes is not always what's actually true. Commonly held opinions are frequently just plain false. Often we are persuaded by authority and repetition rather than by evidence and reality. This tendency to accept what surrounds us makes it difficult to separate what we really know from what we just believe we know... How can people, for thousands of years, believe false assertions that are easily disproved? Answer: Individuals tend to accept ideas if people they know and respect state or believe those ideas. You need to be very clear about the foundations of your opinions. If you believe something only because another person - even a professor - told you it was so, then you should not view your understanding as rock solid... Search for evidence and don't be satisfied until you know the why. The authors of the above quote use Galileo as an example. For nearly 2000 years, everyone believed Aristotle's idea that objects fall at a rate proportional to their ...

In Pride and Prejudice , Jane Austen has created a character who is both irritating and amusing - Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She is the epitome of the bossy and nosy neighbor, and her rank and wealth give her the right to be so. As the owner of a large estate, anyone who is economically dependent on her patronage needs to stay in her good graces because she holds the purse strings. Yet, Austen's dry wit makes it plain to the reader that Lady Catherine's omniscience exists only in her own mind. Here are a few examples of how she advises those who have the misfortune of not being as enlightened as herself: When the ladies returned to the drawing-room, there was little to be done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did without any intermission till coffee came in, delivering her opinion on every subject in so decisive a manner as proved that she was not used to have her judgment controverted. She inquired into Charlotte's domestic concerns familiarly and min...

We have been told from ancient times that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I agree with that. And yet I must find myself in a small minority because I find it difficult to find many people who put their own philosophies and their religious convictions under a microscope and ask themselves, "Why do I believe what I believe? Do I believe it simply because it has been passed on to me by my parents or the subcultural community that I have been in?"... Why do you believe what you believe? Because what you believe determines how you live. And so it is a very important question to ask yourself particularly as a Christian, because there is real sense in which we are called upon to justify to our believe systems, not just to our neighbor but to ourselves, because we are called to be mature in our faith. Paul tells us to be babes in evil but in our understanding to be adults, which means we have to use the minds that God has given us to see the basis for our truth. This ...