The Christian Vanguard

 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...

A friend asked me for biblical data concerning transgenderism. Here is what I wrote. I just copy-pasted from instagram, so, no spacings. I'll come back and edit later.  Okay, so, throughout the Bible, we have the warnings and condemnations about temple prostitutes. You see it in Deuteronomy 23:17-18, 1 Kings 14:24,15:12 22:46 and 2 Kings 23:7. So, you need to know some background, but these prostitutes were also trans (we'll just say trans for now, not trans-vestite, gender, or sexual). How do we know this? So from the textbook "Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia" it says this: "Since homosexual love was perfectly tolerated in the land, provided that it did not harm anyone, it should not be surprising to see professional homosexuals here, as if to balance the 'religious' prositutes mentioned above, the assinu, the kurgarru, the kulu'u, and even, on occasion, the kolû, who had rather a bad reputation in this regard, although we do not really know why. Nor...

We read in Matthew 13:55-56 Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things? Protestants will point to this verse and say that this proves that the Perpetual Virginity of Mary is false. Is that so? It is true that the most natural reading of the Greek word for "brothers" and "sisters" is read to mean blood brothers. As many good Catholics have already pointed out, while the word does encompass the blood brother understanding, it is by no means limited to it. And plenty of early church witnesses testify that they are his cousins. The early church is by no means unanimous, some think they are his blood brothers, others think they are cousins, while some others think they are St. Joseph's children from a previous marriage before he married Mary. But my point is that the early church does provide precedent for the be...

I have a beautiful Ignatius RSV Bible. It has my name inscribed on it, but what really stands out are the images on the cover. You have Jesus in the center, but then you also have a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle surrounding him. What do these signify? In the Old Testament, these four images are found in one scene described in Ezekiel 1, which reads,  In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. This was their appearance: they were of human form. 6 Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. ... 10 As for the appearance of their faces: the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle; 11 such were their faces. In Ezekiel 10:20 we learn that cherubim, or angels, were being described. Some theologians take these descriptions to correspond to some attribute the cherubim have. Man for the power of rationality, the lion for majesty, the ox for strength and the eagle ...

Having started teaching catechism at my parish again, I forget that some of the kids really are starting from scratch, and some didn't know how to read bible citations. So, I made this handout to teach kids how to read, understand, and write bible citations. Hope you find it useful and any feedback is welcome! 

In Christendom, the doctrine of Original Sin is not controversial. There have been notable Christians whom have denied it such as Pascal and presently Swinburne, but there hasn't been any significant group of Christians who deny it. To deny the doctrine is to easily fall into the Pelegian heresy. However, many of my friends are members of the International Church of Christ, and they deny Original Sin, and though they're not a significant portion of Christendom, they're significant to me simply because many of my friends are members, and so I want to dedicate a couple posts to the topic. In this first post, biblical data will be the focus.

From the early church up to 1930, virtually every church believed contraception was a sin. That fact alone should have us induce that contraception is in fact a sin. Yet, there are many Christians today, even in my own congregation, that will never entertain the possibility of contraception being a sin.

There have been debates emerging about gun control after each tragic shooting that I have seen on the news. Virginia Tech, Aurora, and now Newtown (I was too young to remember the reaction after Columbine). The debate that has emerged after the Newtown shooting seems to be fiercer since many of the victims were little children, and as responsible Christian citizens, we ought to have some biblical background to the debate, so that we may safely navigate through the issue. So, what does the Bible say about gun control?

What does the Bible have to say about abortion? I used to think this issue was Biblically clear-cut, even on the non-believing side, but as I have been browsing some atheist and skeptical websites and blogs, there seems to be this idea that the Bible is either silent on the issue, or is actually for it. That is not true. Here is a list of verses that supposedly support abortion. They all fail.