Around the Horn – 1.21.10

Does God Hate Haiti?
This from Al Mohler: The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe. The entire cosmos awaits the revelation of the glory of the coming Lord. Creation cries out for the hope of the New Creation.

Haunted by Haiti
The pictures of dead bodies piled in the streets, parents carrying their limp children, and appendages stretching out from underneath rubble were everywhere. On every channel, every website, and every cardio machine at the gym. I know you saw them also. Suddenly, our lives seemed so simple and so blessed. Whatever had troubled us before we were haunted by Haiti suddenly shrank in significance as the reality of true pain and massive suffering pressed itself before our eyes and into our hearts.

The Problem of Evil
John Frame, drawing on Romans 3 John Frame addresses the knotty problem: For many today and throughout history, the problem of evil has represented the most serious objection to the Christian faith. Some very brilliant philosophers have thought that this problem conclusively refutes belief in the Christian God. But not only professors of philosophy — ordinary people, too, often feel this problem deeply. You don’t have to be a sophisticated philosopher to doubt the reality of God when a loved one is going through terrible suffering. At such times the “problem of evil” is not so much a learned argument as it is a simple cry of the heart, “How could a loving God allow this?”  That’s it, in a nutshell.

A Pastoral Theology of Suffering and Evil (audio)
This from D.A. Carson

The Secret of Deliverance from Evil
Horatius Bonar writes:  There is “evil” in the world. The world is now the opposite of what God made it, “good,” “very good.” It lies in wickedness. There is evil within and without; evil moral and material. “Every creature of God” was made good, but each one has become evil. There is evil in the sense of disorder, pain, disease, sorrow, death. There is evil in the sense of sin. It is this last that our text points to; for evil in the sense of disease, or death, or sorrow, is not to be cured just now, by the remedy our text suggests, or by any remedy whatever.

Do Christians Have a Worldview?
Frames of reference are keys to understanding, to reading the world of our experience. Eric Fromm found that out as a young man before he became a prominent therapist and humanist thinker. He contemplated the carnage of the First World War and wondered, “How come such violence? How could cultured peoples slaughter each other in the millions?” That thought led him to study Karl Marx and the outer world of human history. He wanted to make some kind of sense of the world of his experience.

Why We Left The Episcopal Church
The Rev’d John Yates and Os Guinness in a Washington Post interview: The core issue for us is theological: the intellectual integrity of faith in the modern world. It is thus a matter of faithfulness to the lordship of Jesus, whom we worship and follow. The American Episcopal Church no longer believes the historic, orthodox Christian faith common to all believers. Some leaders expressly deny the central articles of the faith — saying that traditional theism is “dead,” the incarnation is “nonsense,” the resurrection of Jesus is a fiction, the understanding of the cross is “a barbarous idea,” the Bible is “pure propaganda” and so on. Others simply say the creed as poetry or with their fingers crossed.

Top Ten Quarterbacks of All Time?
Peyton Manning and Brett Favre have Super Bowl rings on their minds as they get ready for their respective conference championship games, but both have other things at stake Sunday.  Each future Hall of Famer can enhance his status among the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.  Where do they rank?

A Year Later, Voters Send A Different Message
From the NYT:  What happened in Massachusetts on Tuesday was no ordinary special election.  Scott Brown, a Republican state senator for only five years, shocked and arguably humiliated the White House and the Democratic Party establishment by defeating Martha Coakley in the race for a United States Senate seat. He did it one day short of a year after President Obama stood on the steps of the United States Capitol, looking across a mass of faces that celebrated the potential of his presidency.