Mockingbird Ministries was kind enough to post one of my pieces, entitled “Adam Smith and the Nature of Heaven.” It delves into how the popular idea that “good people go to heaven” kind of misunderstands what heaven actually is. You can check it out here, and make sure you browse through more of the awesome content Mockingbird has to offer. Thanks!
Intersections of scripture and life
Tag: #faith
The American mainland is apparently now within range of North Korean missiles, bringing the prospect of nuclear attack to my generation for the first time (the Berlin Wall fell nineteen days before I was born).
It’s safe to say at this point that we are involved in another cold war, although this time it’s with a country smaller than Missouri and lacking the capability the old Soviet Union had of annihilating the US over the course of a lunch break. But the Soviet Union, for all its atrocities, was run by calculating men who proved unwilling to subject the world to nuclear war. By contrast, it’s distressingly unclear whether the leaders of North Korea are, in fact, sane.
The threat posed by North Korean nukes can be greatly exaggerated, but it is real. It’s also a good opportunity for American Christians to reflect on how to live in the face of potential horrors. The obvious answer is that we must live by faith, and this is certainly true, but we need to be careful about what we mean, exactly, by the word “faith.”
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881) by Vasily Perov
Very few have looked into the near-infinite abyss of evil as deeply as the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. And no one, ever, has produced a finer statement of atheism than the one he put in the mouth of Ivan, the middle brother in his masterwork Brothers Karamazov.
Yet Dostoevsky himself believed. Faith certainly did not come easy for him; it required hand-to-hand combat with unbelief. On one occasion he remarked, “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”
President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. November 22, 1963.
Since John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, people have leveled conspiracy accusations variously at the CIA, the Mafia, the CIA and Mafia working together, the Soviet KGB, pro-Castro Cubans, anti-Castro Cubans, Mossad, the American military establishment, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lyndon B. Johnson – and that is by no means a comprehensive list. Recently declassified government documents regarding the murder of JFK appear unlikely to overturn the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but even more unlikely to end speculation that he didn’t. Whatever these documents say or don’t say, some folks will always suspect that hidden forces were (and are) at play.
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