The Christian Vanguard

 Here is a common argument I hear against Mary's sinlessness that is plainly invalid.  1) If Mary sinned, then she would die 2) Mary died 3) Therefore, Mary sinned The idea here is that mortality is a result of the fall. If Adam and Eve had never sinned, they would have remained immortal, in a sense. And since Mary died, she must have been subject to sin.  The obvious problem with this is that it is invalid. It follows the form of Affirming the Consequent .  1) If A, then B 2) B 3) Therefore, A Is obviously an invalid inference.  But supposing it was valid, each premise requires some justification anyway. Jesus didn't sin, yet He died. And how do we know Mary died? A point against this is that there is no strong devotion to the burial site or relics of Mary, but we do have them for the Apostles. Not definitive points perhaps, but the point remains, the argument is simply invalid. 

 From the book "The Ambassador's Guide to Islam" by Alan Shlemon.  1. The Qur'an says the words of God cannot be changed or corrupted  2. The Qur'an says the Bible is the Word of God 3. Therefore, on the Qur'an's authority, the Bible could not have been changed or corrupted, as many Muslims claim  Three citations in support of 1 are given.  Surah 6:34, "Rejected were the messengers before thee: with patience and constancy they bore their rejection and their wrongs, until Our aid did reach them: there is none that can alter the words (and decrees) of Allah . Already hast thou received some account of those messengers." Surah 6:115, "The Word of your Lord has been perfected in truth and justice. None can change His Words . And He is the All-Hearing, All- Knowing." Surah 10:64, "For them are glad tidings, in the life of the present and in the Hereafter; no change can there be in the words of Allah. This is indeed the supreme felicit...

 In a discussion between a Christian and Muslim, I heard the following analogy. To understand how God can be three persons and one nature, think of three humans. You have three persons, but all one nature, the human nature.  Preliminary comment. All analogies for understanding God will come short in some respect since God is totally unique. God can't be compared to anything, so no analogy is appropriate. That said, they are helpful. We just need to understand that they will have limits.  The limit here is that one could easily respond with: yes, there are three persons, and they all are of the same nature, human. But there are also three humans, which would mean you would have to say there are also three gods. That's an unacceptable consequence for a Trinitarian, and it's often what Muslims will say Christians are forced to believe.  I read the following explanation from J.P. Moreland some years ago, I forgot the title of the book, but a similar analogy, which I thin...

 Being a dad has given me a new perspective on things. One of them is sin. Of course, I know sin is bad. I know sin is evil. I know the consequences of sin, even if I don't grasp the full effects of them. But being a dad, I've come to appreciate the ugliness of sin. I reflect on the joy of my son. He is constantly happy. His biggest emotional dips of the day are when he doesn't get his milk fast enough. Not a very tough life. I will sit him in my lap to read to him, and I get brief glimpses of how God views me. And then sin intrudes upon my joy, and this congruence sucks my joy away. I remember that at some time, perhaps in the not too distant future, my son will experience real sin. My glowing bundle of joy will have his lights turned out some day. Cloudy skies are on his horizon, and I can't do anything to stop it. It's just the fallen world we live in. And it's ugly. There's a kind of healthy hatred of sin one can have. A disappointment in one self, and ...

 A common question you might hear from Muslims is, "Does Jesus have a God?" The answer is Yes, of course He does. He says this repeatedly in scripture. Romans 15:6, 2 Cor 1:3, Ephesians 1:3;7. Now where this goes from here is usually with a follow up question: How is this possible? I've listened to many Christians stumble in trying to answer this question and get steamrolled by Muslims. And I've seen it happen enough to motivate me to write down an answer.  How is possible that God have a God? There are a couple ways to answer this. The first is to analyze what "to have a God" means. Because this could be interpreted in a few different ways, I suspect that Muslim apologists get a lot of mileage out of not defining this relation. What it means to "have" a God is commonly meant as something like creator. We commonly understand the Christian God to be our Creator and Sustainer. So, to say that Jesus has a God would mean that Jesus is also a created be...

The word "patriot" has as part of it's root the Latin word for "Father". Think of the prayer "Pater Nostra" for example. It's a bit of an older way of speaking, but we sometimes call our home country the "Fatherland". So someone who is a patriot is someone who has a love for their fatherland, or their home country. Patriotism describes one's love for their fatherland. When it comes to love of America, there is something in the culture which causes some people to pause or hesitate. Should we love America?  Sometimes you see this in the current culture war surrounding the phrase "Make America Great Again". I often hear a leftist ask, "When was America ever great?" So, if I were to tell my leftist friends I was proud to be an American, or I love that I am an American, they may ask, "What is there to be proud of?" with their noses raised.  There is plenty to be proud of. I can worship the Lord every Sunday wi...

 Suppose one took the traditional position that an unjust law is no law at all. This has the curious consequence of having to say that there are no such thing as bad laws. When countries have codified slavery, we can't say that they have a bad law on the books, because that law isn't real to begin with. But this seems counter intuitive. We do want to say that countries have bad laws. Other than being a legal positivist, one way out of this is to draw the parallels from metaphysics more generally. So when we say that evil exists, we could say that we don't mean it literally since evil is a deprivation and deprivations don't have their own positive ontology. Rather, evil is parasitic upon being. Likewise, we can say that bad laws do exist, but that they are parasitic upon something else. What this could be, I'm not certain, perhaps parasitic upon the governing authorities, but that would be a place to start this investigation. 

 Having come from an anabaptist background, we believed in the necessity of baptism for salvation. But we also believed that there was only one baptism that we needed to partake in. One question that I had which made Catholicism more plausible to me was: how are your sins forgiven post baptism? Since baptism forgives sins, and you can only do it once, how is it that sins that you commit after your baptism are forgiven? You could confess to God, but surely you could do that before baptism as well. This made me believe the sacrament of confession made more sense. But if I were to remain a protestant anabaptist, how could I answer this?  One answer could be that baptism works preemptively to forgive future sins. But this leads to a doctrine similar, if not outright the same, to the Once Saved Always Saved. That is to say, once God has forgiven you and written your name in the book of life, you are there forever. But I suspect many anabaptist would recoil at this solution. What ot...

 What is the Church in Protestantism? A common answer is that it is like an invisible fellowship of believers. So if Adam, Bryan and Chad gather for worship and some Bible reading, that is a microcosm of a church. Small, sure, but still a church gathering. Contrast this with something a bit stronger, which claims a visible church. An institution which exists that has defined rules for membership like the sacrament of baptism for example. What are the defined rules of membership within Protestantism? It doesn't seem to have a good answer for this.  Take their common answer that it is an invisible fellowship of common believers. There are two red flags to be raised here. First, how do you defined what it is that is needed to believe? Second, what is it that does that if not a visible institution? So suppose the Protestant says you need to believe in the Trinity, and so a church is a fellowship of Trinitarian believers. Okay, first, why is it that the Trinity needs to be believed...

 Hey, it's been a while. Graduated school, and stopped some of my reading and writing. But I have few thoughts. Hopefully I can get this back up and running again. If not, whatever, a place to jot down some thoughts.  Suppose that the Catholic doctrine of the Papacy were false. Would it follow that Catholicism is false? Or would it follow that Catholicism isn't the place to be? On one hand, it would seem that the Papacy is one of the core or essential doctrines of the Catholic church, and yeah, to have that be false would seem to falsify the entire institution. But that may be too fast of a move. If it were false, then that would put Catholicism in the same boat as Protestantism. How do I mean? I mean that since Protestant churches do no claim to be infallible, then possibly some part of their doctrine is wrong. And most Protestants would agree that there is SOMETHING about their doctrine that is incorrect, even if they cannot currently identify exactly what that is. It would ...