Reviews for Revelation of Life Eternal: An Introduction to the Christian Message

The average rating for Revelation of Life Eternal: An Introduction to the Christian Message based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-07 00:00:00 Scott Chisholm Some of this book is so unintentionally funny. The sub-title is "A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity". To do this our Mr Strobel puts these Toughest Objections to several top guys and presents us with these interviews where they wrestle mightily. So here he is talking with Norman L Geisler who is "one of the most well-known and effective defenders of Christianity in the world". The Tough Objection at this point is "God isn't worthy of worship if he kills innocent children" which is a tough one, you must admit. He puts it to Norman that the Old Testament is stuffed full of acts of arbitrary cruelty by God, such as God commanding the Israelites to commit genocide - Norman is able to bat these away - foo, foo, the Amelekites, they were terrible, you should be glad they were got rid of. You should have seen them. But Lee then pulls out the incident of Elisha and the children : And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. (tare means tore) "Now, Dr Geisler, you insisted that God is not capricious but that sounds like an outrageous response to a minor and silly offence. Mauling 42 innocent little children just because they poked fun of some bald guy is awfully severe." Geisler was well acquainted with the issue. Geisler replied "These were not small innocent children." Having anticipated his response I pulled out a photocopy of the passage and thrust it in his direction. "Yes they were," I retorted. "Look right there," I said, pointing to the words. "It says 'little children'". "Unfortunately the King James version has a misleading translation there," he said. "Scholars have established that the original Hebrew is best translated 'young man'. The New International Version renders the word 'youths'. As best we can tell, this was a violent mob of dangerous teenagers, comparable to a modern street gang. The life of the prophet was in danger by the sheer number of them - if 42 were mauled, who knows how many were threatening him in total?... And their remarks about Elisha being bald were most likely a reference to the fact that lepers in those days shaved their heads. So they were assailing Elisha - a man of dignity and authority as a prophet of God - as a detestable and despicable outcast….. If a menacing mob of teenagers got away with this and God didn't come to the defence of his prophet, just think of the negative effect that would have on society. In fact, as once commentator said : 'The disastrous fall of Samaria would have been avoided had the people repented after the bear attack'." I'm happy to report that Lee Strobel's doubts about God for making violent she-bears maim 42 little children were entirely resolved. I imagine him leaning back in the armchair with a big "Whew!" after all this. What hilarious poppycock. How can educated people get themselves into these grossly undignified verbal gyrations? You can see them twisting and turning like the slippery eel to get God off the hook. Ooo-er, miracles contradict science. Heck, a Loving God would surely never torture people in Hell for all Eternity. Ya might think. Oh crumbs, Church History is Littered with Oppression and Violence (and child abuse, he might have added). Lemme think, lemme think All these mighty posers are grappled with and after three or four rounds (three falls or one submission to declare the winner) are defeated by the brains here on display. Well, none of this is needed of course. It's all entirely useless energy. It is surely obvious that religion a) provides for a permanent need in most people (Marxists thought it would wither & die but that ain't happening any time soon) and b) is conducted in forms inherited from pre-scientific and pre-secular societies. You can clearly see the awkward evolution of the concept of God in the Bible, from the crudities of the contest between Elijah and the priests of Baal to the Platonic sophistries of St Paul. Given that, there are no problems with any of these tough objections really. Okay, there is with one, which I dealt with in my review of chapter 1. But the others? Ffft. A WHISTLE-STOP TOUR OF THE TOUGHEST OBJECTIONS (HUH, THEY AIN'T SO TOUGH) "Since Miracles contradict science, they cannot be true" - correct. Next! "Evolution Explains Life, so God isn't Needed" - hold on there, what's that again? Does evolution explain how there is something rather than nothing? Or why we have these particular physical laws and not others? I think we need more scientists than Charles Darwin to explain Life. & even when we have the whole Cernfuls of them, their explanations make as much sense as Genesis to most of us. So I don't think it's all as neat and tidy as this Tough Objection implies. However, miracles do not exist except in the minds some people. Next. "God Isn't Worthy of Worship if he kills Tiny Little Innocent Wee Children" - well, yes, that seems to be true. But he might have his reasons (see above). "It's Offensive to Claim Jesus is the Only Way to God." Well, yes it is. Although it's also not credible to assert that the maker of all the universes has a deep and abiding interest in what You - yes, YOU - do with your private parts. So, if you stop making these weird assertions you won't have to cudgel your brain thinking of ways to defend them. "A Loving God would Never Torture People in Hell." Quite so - they thought that Hell at least brought some order to a chaotic universe in the Middle Ages, but that was then and this is now. Only heavy metal fans really believe in Hell anymore. The rest of us have to decide if there is an afterlife what happens to Jeffrey Dahmer or Sid Vicious. I don't want to be spending an eternity with those characters, don't know about you. So yeah, a hell-less afterlife is quite a problem, but maybe there isn't an afterlife at all. Or maybe it's just like a giant parking lot which stretches infinitely - oh stop. To summarise, Hell - no! "Church History is Littered with Oppression and Violence." That's a tough objection? But it's a man-made institution, so of course it is! Come on, get real, kids, that's not an objection at all. "I Still Have Doubts, so I Can't be a Christian." Hmm, I would rephrase that - "I Still Have Doubts so there's Hope Yet." No, that's mean. But may the Lord protect and save me from those who have no doubts! IN CONCLUSION I think it's time for me to stop trying to find an interpretation of Christianity which makes sense. Its mysteries shake down into two "tough" problems for me - theodicy, which is the fancy word for the efforts to solve problem of evil (see review of the first chapter of this book), and the Crucifixion - what was the nature of this central act, what do Christians think actually happened, or to put it another way, why did Jesus have to die in order to save the human race from sin and what does any of that mean? I think every Christian really struggles with both those questions in every century since AD 33 - certainly all those whose books I've been reading over the last couple of years do. As well they might. They're insoluble. It doesn't make sense. That doesn't mean Christianity is not true - just means that in the profoundest way it's non-sense, beyond language. I'm too literal-minded. Got no ear for it. Funny really, because I love the KJV, and my iPod is stuffed with Christian music. So let's end with a favourite old hymn. Farther along we'll know all about it, Farther along we'll understand why; Cheer up, my brother, come sing in the sunshine We'll understand it all by and by. P Bryant in the afterlife "Where now are your gibes, Mr Reviewer?"

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-03 00:00:00 Sherwin Peterson A review of Chapter one only. It was pretty mind-blowing. Chapter 1 deals with the problem of Evil which is always the Big One, and here we find a very remarkable interview with Peter Kreeft, Christian philosopher. Maybe for the first time I am beginning to really get an idea of the worldview of the thinking Christian. It's so alien. See what you think. As you will know the problem was stated by Epicurus 300 years before Christ : God may be all powerful and he may be Good but he cannot be both, because of the presence of evil. So, God could choose to prevent the birth of Hitler, because he could, but he didn't do that, so he's omnipotent but not good. Or, he wanted to prevent the birth of Hitler, but he couldn't, because he's not omnipotent. Let me say that neither the author Lee Strobel nor Prof Kreeft spends any time contemplating that maybe God isn't good or loving. For them, the idea is unthinkable. Kreeft's two ideas here are that suffering on Earth is short-term, and people who moan about it are just not seeing the big picture. But let the man himself explain: If God's wisdom vastly exceeds ours… it is at least possible that a loving God could deliberately tolerate horrible things like starvation because he foresees that in the long run more people will be better and happier than if he miraculously intervened. That's at least intellectually possible…. It's at least possible that God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which he foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. Therefore he's not being evil by allowing pain to exist. The universe is a soul-making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of our lives in this world isn't comfort, but training and preparation for eternity….suffering is compatible with God's love if it is medicinal, remedial, and necessary; that is, if we are very sick and desperately need a cure. And that's our situation. Strobel puts the question : "But good people suffer just as much - or sometimes more- than the bad." Kreeft floors him with a haymaker: Well, the answer is that there are no good people. And follows up by saying we should thank God for all the suffering we get to go through on Earth. : In Heaven we will say to God "Thank you so much for this little pain I didn't understand at the time, and that little pain; these I now see were the most precious things in my life. So - thank you God that Ted Bundy kidnapped, raped and killed my daughter then went back and violated her corpse. Thank you God that my mother has Alzheimers for ten years. Thank you God I and my whole family were killed in that earthquake although we didn't get much chance to learn much and grow and mature from that experience. Thank you God for female genital mutilation, that has helped millions of girls to learn and grow spiritually. Thank you God for Aids. Thank you…. Well, I think you get the picture. But this concept of Christianity (& I assume the other two monotheist faiths) clearly does imply this kind of (what I would describe as) inhuman version of reality. Kreeft pulls no punches: Compared with knowing God eternally, compared to the intimacy with God that Scripture calls a spiritual marriage, nothing else counts. If the way through that is torture, well, torture is nothing compared with that. So, there we have it. In many theology books I have read this question is simply pussyfooted around with. Nobody gets in your face like this guy Kreeft. My hat's off to him. You can clearly see the connection between his Christianity and the current jihadi version of Islam. Isis would 100% agree with Kreeft, except for the bit about Jesus which I have omitted from the above excerpts. Now, just to be clear, I do of course think this point of view is deranged but it's coldly rigorous. It really does make its own sense. This life on Earth is nothing. Heaven is everything. Anything that gets us to Heaven is good. Suffering gets us to Heaven. Suffering is good. Evil is good.