Blog - Page 303 of 318 - John H Armstrong

Preserving Peace Through Strength

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:36-05:00February 21st, 2006|Categories: Politics|

Radical pacifism is alive and well in the United States. Behind a great deal of opposition to every war there are those who genuinely believe the New Testament obligates them to non-participation in armed conflict. I have great respect for such conviction, found particularly in the Anabaptist tradition. I once seriously considered this position myself, in my late teens, and have friends who truly hold this ethical stance out of loyalty to Christ as Lord.

But I have serious reservations about the more popular kinds of pacifism that stir up “antiwar” and “peace protests” in our present context. If these views had been dominant in the 1940s I am convinced that Nazism would have swept Europe. If they had been dominant in the 1950s and 1960s Communism would have prevailed in the world. Now that the threat to the West, and its freedoms, is militant Islam the stakes are just as high. The arguments for an antiwar stance range from a lingering commitment to unilateral disarmament all the way to naively embracing the lies that radical Islam wants peace with the West. […]

When William Willimon Speaks I Listen

By John Armstrong|2006-02-20T09:50:00-06:00February 20th, 2006|Categories: Politics|

William Willimon is the bishop of the Methodist Church in Alabama. He is also a widely respected writer and a very able preacher of the gospel. If you don’t know his work you have missed something. Every preacher, and serious Christian thinker, ought to read "Will," as he is called by friends. You will disagree at some points but you will profit for sure.

Willimon has a unique way of cutting the chase when he writes about public issues. He is keenly prophetic and quite often provocative. He once said, “There can be no better work for us than—in our own way, in our own place—to testify to the fact that God rules the world; nations do not.”

Someone needs to remind Iran, North Korea, and Syria of this truth. But someone also ought to remind Israel and the United States of America that this is true, especially in the light of the responsibility these Western nations have before God. If God’s preachers will not speak to this matter who will? I am a political conservative, for several intellectually formed […]

The Tyranny of Medical Research and the Body-Police

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:36-05:00February 16th, 2006|Categories: Science|

Modern medical research has done a great deal of obvious good. Life spans have been lengthened in recent decades and people generally enjoy healthier lives as a result of studies in nutrition and diet.

But there is a real trap for some in these continued medical discoveries. Hard science is necessarily committed to a continued quest for better knowledge based upon better research. The results mean that once “proven” assumptions about good or bad can be altered again and again. A good example of this was seen in the recent research evidence that coffee is not nearly as bad for you as was previously assumed.

Manfred Kroger, a retired food scientist from Penn State University, says: “A lot of early research was flawed. Coffee lovers are more likely to do harmful things like smoke and drink alcohol in excess, so coffee was often falsely incriminated.” The health benefits of coffee are not so great that anyone is urging you to up your intake significantly. Pregnant women are still urged to abstain. And large amounts of coffee still appear to present […]

Charles Colson and the Culture Commission

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:36-05:00February 13th, 2006|Categories: Culture|

Many pastors and church leaders are confused about the present culture wars. They either embrace them uncritically, adopting the views, and even the rhetoric, of people they hold in esteem, or they sit them out, saying (in effect) that the Great Commission trumps all Christian involvement with such culture issues. But these two extremes are not the only options.

Charles Colson, who seems to understand this matter very clearly, suggested several months ago that we are called to obey both the Great Commission and the culture commission. Christians, Colson rightly argues, are called upon to bring the gospel of saving grace to their neighbors, because of love for Christ and their neighbor. But they are also called upon to be engaged as agents of common grace in the culture commission. Colson argues that the culture commission includes things like “sustaining and renewing creation, defending the created institutions of family and society, critiquing false worldviews, etc.”

I agree with Colson. However, I think a large mistake in category is often made at this precise point. The church is to be a family, or […]

Responding to Islam's Passion Over Blasphemy

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:36-05:00February 11th, 2006|Categories: Islam|

Blasphemy is in the news. Mocking God has been a non-issue, at least in Western civil society, for nearly one hundred years. A combination of Enlightenment thought, joined with a correct understanding of what Jesus taught about church-state and one’s public and private actions, helped to rid the West of barbaric attempts to enforce respect for God. Now, the issue blasphemy is all about violent Muslim reaction to cartoon portrayals of the prophet Muhammad. The outcry from the West is strong. Freedom of speech is our highest value, so it seems. Religion is a private affair and of no concern to the public in general.

But is religion simply a private idea? Isn’t the worship of the true God, and living in obedience to his law, our highest ideal as Christians? And to raise that age-old problem we Western Christians face every day: “How does our faith properly intersect with public policy and practice?” Mercatornet (www.mercatornet.com) editor Michael Cook argued in “Blasphemy, Protest and Freedom” (February 10, 2006) that Christians, of all people, should be able to […]

The Gains & Losses of Orthodox Feminism

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:36-05:00February 10th, 2006|Categories: Feminism & Women|

Women have made great gains in modern Western society. Except for the poorest of the poor these gains have benefited almost all women in some way. These gains are the result of a significant social revolution that we have undergone as a society over the past fifty years.

Perhaps the most important early influence in this massive social change was Betty Friedan, who passed away last Saturday (February 5). Friedan was always interesting and often inflammatory. She spoke out on a number of issues over the course of her eighty-five years of life, at times offending the very feminist movement she helped to nurture and grow. Her 1963 bomshell, The Feminine Mystique, was a best-seller. It clearly expressed the agenda for a radical break from the post-World War II Eisenhower era and shattered what has been called “the cozy suburban ideal.” A 1999 New York State University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century voted the book No. 37 on the list.

Showing that she could listen to some of her more conservative critics Betty Friedan’s […]

The Fraud Goes On

By John Armstrong|2006-02-09T07:52:34-06:00February 9th, 2006|Categories: Science|

Professor Peter Singer, of Princeton University, is one of the leading advocates in out time for the culture of death. Last year Singer wrote: “During the next 35 years the traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments. By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hardcore, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct. In retrospect, 2005 may be seen as the year in which that position became untenable.”

Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek, further chortled that “The South Korean” efforts in cloning human embryos to produce stem cells would prove to be a “brilliant scientific breakthrough” that would expose the “perverse” position of the “Bush bitter-enders and the pope.” Wow! What a major contribution to the human family that “breakthrough” might prove to be. And exposing the “perverse” position of Bush and the pope is truly a marvel […]

A Homosexual Challenge Met with Grace and Wisdom

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:36-05:00February 2nd, 2006|Categories: Homosexuality|

Soulforce’s Equality Ride is coming to Wheaton College, April 20-21. I didn’t even know what Soulforce was until this morning. The goal of the Soulforce Equality Ride is to change the policies and practices of the institutions they plan to visit, which includes fourteen Christian colleges that are member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

Soulforce states its purpose to be: “Freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious and political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance.” A visit to the Web site of Soulforce http://www.soulforce.org/ reveals that the organization has built its Equality Ride agenda around the philosophy and practices of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. In their own words: “At military and religious colleges around the nation, bans on gays, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender enrollment forces students into closets of fear and self-hate. These bans devalue the life of GLBT people and they slam the door on academic freedom. The Equality Ride empowers young adults to challenge those college bans.”

So why visit Wheaton College? Well, Wheaton […]

A Sobering Fact About Generosity

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:37-05:00January 31st, 2006|Categories: Donors and Funding|

I study the issue of generosity a good bit. Since my own ministry depends upon the generosity of Christians I need to understand how to respond to issues that relate to charitable giving. Thus, I confess that I was a bit surprised when I learned a few weeks ago that the year-end IRS statistics about giving in America reveal that the poorest in our society are in fact the most generous givers.

Each year IRS compiles statistics about household giving. The most recent figures, for 2003, show the following:

1. Households with adjusted gross incomes of $10,000 to $15,000 gave 11.6 percent to charity.
2. Households with incomes of $50,000 to $55,000 gave 4 percent.
3. Households with incomes of $200,000 to $500,000 gave only 2.5 percent.

Regardless of what you how you break down giving among other income levels what is most surprising is that the families in the lowest income levels are the ones that gave a tithe or more, on average.

The second amazing thing I noted in this data was that there is […]

How Should We Respond to Growing Income Inequality?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:24:37-05:00January 28th, 2006|Categories: Economy/Economics|

A national report, issued on Thursday (January 26), shows that the gap between the nation’s top wage earners and lower- and middle-income families is growing over the past two plus decades. This gap began to grow in the 1980s (slowed from 1996-2002) and continues to increase off and on since. Liberals and conservatives view the gap very differently. These difference allow us to think about social and economic policy seriously.

Consider, for point of reference, that the study shows that the richest 20 percent of families had average incomes 6.8 times as large as the poorest 20 percent in the early 2000s, up from 5.4 times in the early 1980s. And the highest incomes in the early 2000s were 2.5 times as large as the middle 20 percent, up from 2 times twenty years ago. Average incomes for the richest people were up 51% overall and only 21.5% for middle income families. Average incomes for the poor rose by 20.5% during the same period!

So, what are we to make of this data? Ah, there’s the problem. Liberal economists see […]