Philosophy
Preface to BIBLICAL ETHICS, Volume 1: Old Testament Flourishing
When we live the way we are supposed to, God is glorified and we are blessed (happy)! Sadly, most well-meaning dutiful Christians take issue with the notion that happiness is for the here-and-now, delaying it for the afterlife. Too often they gorge themselves on an ethical diet of doing the right thing out of a sense of duty, while their …
April 30, 2019 Tuesday at 5:48 pm
unseen
When I was in graduate school at Biola, I had a professor who would call us “naturalists”! At the time I thought he was saying it in jest, but now I realize he was at least partially kidding. So how can self-professed Christians be naturalists? I think what my professor meant was that as Christians we often behave as if …
February 2, 2019 Saturday at 10:58 pm
Worldly Happiness vs. Biblical Happiness
Worldly “happiness” is merely subjective (i.e., emotional) and non-virtuous, ergo, non-moral, not to mention superficial and fleeting. The world seeks it directly as a feeling but cannot attain it because true happiness is a byproduct of morality (e.g., justice and righteousness). By comparison, biblical happiness is character-based. That is, true felicity is virtuous, ergo, moral. True, it involves emotions and …
October 28, 2018 Sunday at 12:01 am
Spiritual (Character) Formation
One of my favorite Bible verses is 2 Corinthians 5:17, which claims, “anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” (NLT) But what does that mean in relation to who we are as a complete human being? Does it mean that everything about us–our whole spiritual AND moral …
September 3, 2018 Monday at 10:43 pm
Plight of an Artist II
Curiosity and distractibility are braided together. Imagination and impulsivity hold hands. Temptation is built in to this intricate web of choosing. Patience–a virtue–is your best friend helping you unravel the knots of tension between beauty and betrayal. Wisdom–another friendly virtue–requires a vocation of untangling flowers from weeds. This, too, is the plight of an artist.
August 4, 2018 Saturday at 3:16 pm
epistemology
Besides the fact that epistemology is a teleological gift, it’s also fascinating because it’s very much like a beam of light, which emits natural revelation and illuminates our path to continue seeking, not only the origin to thought provoking questions, but also to arouse genuine curiosity towards its eternal Source.
August 2, 2018 Thursday at 3:20 am
A LOVING GENERAL
The struggles we encounter are not always elicited by self-destruction and self-dilapidation, but by strategic trials that are necessarily entailed by divine circumstances. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. This is not an appointed suffering by a draconian deity. Look at the life of a “blameless and upright” man like Job, who suffered …
July 19, 2018 Thursday at 9:31 pm
A Complementary Convergence of Divine Command Theory and Divine Motivation Theory in order to Maintain the Traditional View of God’s Sovereignty and to Better Understand His Character
For thousands of years, since the time of Plato, the gauntlet against divine command theory (DCT) has been thrown down. Relatively recently, Robert Adams has retrieved it engaging the conversation with his modified DCT, in which he invokes the loving nature of God and his revealed will. Linda Zagzebski, however, sees a fly in the theological ointment of modified DCT. …
June 1, 2018 Friday at 4:14 pm
Ultimate Paradigm of Goodness–God
The classical Greek matrix of holiness (goodness) is expressed in one of the two horns of a classic moral dilemma called Euthyphro’s Dilemma. In one of Plato’s early dialogues, Euthyphro, Socrates inquires of Euthyphro, a religious expert on the subject of holiness, why holiness is loved by the gods: either holiness is holy because it is loved by the gods …
April 7, 2018 Saturday at 4:45 pm
Thrive Not Just Survive
A strictly Darwinian process of evolution is insufficient to account for a universal principle such as the pursuit of happiness. Admittedly, natural selection as an unguided (“blind”) and purposeless process may explain why human beings seek to survive, but it fails to explain why we seek to thrive. Human flourishing seems superfluous to the individuals who are chosen to pass …
March 17, 2018 Saturday at 3:49 pm
Meet Chester
