Snake Handling Quote

This quote is from the notes my New testament professor sent to us

How many original autographs of the NT documents do we have: 0, 1, 2, 11, 26, 27? Trick question. It’s none. Zero. Nada. We only have copies of the originals. Almost 5600 Greek manuscripts (mss) and no two are alike. There is a huge amount of agreement, but no ms is a perfect copy of a previous ms. Most of the differences are word order, spelling, absence or presence of conjunctions and articles, etc. But there are also included a few major differences. What about the longer ending of Mark? What about the woman caught in adultery in John 8? These are two more popular examples of textual problems. That is why the science of Textual Criticism (TC) came about—it is the effort to find the original text of the NT. A Greek NT’s Critical Apparatus at bottom of each page sometimes takes up half the page or more. It seems like there are a lot of problems. But to put it all in perspective, we have no arguments over 98% of the NT text. Yet we sure like to argue over that last 2%! We should always remember—there is not one single doctrinal problem or issue that is a matter of dispute. Well, perhaps one—if you drink poison or handle snakes as a part of your worship of God, then I will back off my last statement slightly.

And you always thought that the the textual variants didn't threaten any major doctrine!

Video: Supporting Traditional Marriage is NOT About Hate

This was posted on facebook (at least that's where I found it). Opposing legislation to allow for same-sex marriage is not about hate. It is about love. Love for tradition, family, morality, and biblical standards. It is pretty clear that the hatred is coming from those against tradition, family, and morality.



Seriously ask yourself this: why do the supporters of gay marriage relentlessly accuse us of hating them? We've made it clear that we don't hate them and have provided more than enough justification for our support of traditional marriage. I submit to you, dear reader, that we have better arguments for traditional marriage than they have against it... and they know it. So rather than defend their position intellectually and rationally they just (falsely) attack our motives.

Things That Don't Make Sense To Me, Vol. 1

(yes Sarah, I'm copying you)

Flip-Floppers (not to be confused with flippy floppies)


Today at the Depot I had greeter duty. It's simple really, just stand at the front entrance and say "hi" to people as they come in. If you are ambitious like me you'll hand out a one-page ad to them. Good thing I'm ambitious (that's just in case Homer is reading my blog, albeit entirely aside from my point). An elderly man walked in and I said "Hi, welcome to the Home Depot" as I handed him our ad. He takes it and smiles. Five minutes later he's walking back out with an older woman, no doubt his wife, and the following conversation ensues:

Me: Have a nice day sir
Old guy: Do you know the definition of a lesbian?
Me: (as I stifle my shudder) Sorry sir, i'm not interested
Dirty Old guy: oh, you're a Christian huh?
Me: Yes Sir, I sure am!
Old guy: Oh, me too, what church do you go to?
Me: Green Hills Baptist Church in La Habra.
Old guy: I'm a Methodist (Old Guy exits stage right)

Ok, lets think about this. Traditionally the Methodist Church has been a Christian denomination. Granted, liberals in the UMC are drifting further away every year, but in general they are Christian. So think about this: I stop a dirty joke by saying I'm not interested. Old guy assumes (correctly) that I'm not interested in the dirty joke because I'm Christian. The underlying idea is that Christians do not like dirty jokes. Then he turns around and says "oh, I'm Christian too." So riddle me this: why the heck are you telling dirty jokes if you grant the premise that Christians don't like them?

So what if I had feigned interest in his joke? He would have finished it and laughed. But if he stops when I'm not interested, and specifically because of my religious convictions, why then did he start the joke (and would he laugh at the end) if he shares the same convictions? I'm not picking on Methodists here, I'm picking on people who are Flip-Floppers and this man is a perfect example. One minute he is telling a dirty joke to a complete stranger, then he flips and claims to believe what I believe (which would entail not telling dirty jokes). This makes no sense to me.

Why YouTube is Awesome, part 1

Flea Market Montgomery

It's strange how his eyes seem to follow you...

Yes, watch this video. Watch the entire thing and try not to laugh.





It's just like, it's just like, a mini mall!

Dragging up the Past...

...Beating a dead horse, or whatever else you want to call it. Don't bother, I just did. OK, now that that's out of the way I thought I'd blog about something that came to mind today. I was driving south on the 55 earlier today and noticed construction on a lot to the left of the MacArthur exit. The lot, now a hotel in embryo, was formerly the home of a building which housed Faith Community Church; an organization I parted ways with just over a year ago (1 year, 11 days to be precise).

To get the context of this dead horse you may want to grab a barf bag and scroll down this blog to last July. The specific point I have in mind today has to do with the false accusation Morey made against me last July regarding an email I have yet to see or read (but according to Morey, I had written and disseminated with the worst of intentions). Morey had been accused of doing some very crazy things in the past and until this happened to me I was able to easily dismiss those accusations. However, when something this ridiculous hits the fan and makes a mess all over you all of that other stuff comes back and makes you think: is this guy for real?

If you have read what I posted last July and following then this is likely nothing new. But it needs to be said and not forgotten that Robert Morey has falsely accused me of something. A thing that I never did. A thing, which if I had done, he could easily silence my challenge. And what is my challenge? Morey needs to admit he made up a lie about me out of thin air because I was asking questions that (apparently) made him feel bad, or uncomfortable... or guilty. In an email (sent on 7/17/08) to the elders of FCC Morey wrote:

Glen, you have a big decision to make. You have offended your pastor and need to repair the damage if you want to continue to attend this church. The only biblical way is to seek reconciliation through repentance and humility.

Even more seriously, John Powel has forwarded to me the email you sent to him that seeks to sow discord among the brethren about the air conditioner. A family has informed me of a blog from the apostates that is going around that raises this issue as well as the roof.

The apostate who sent out the email did not produce two or three witnesses required by Scripture who verified any biblical wrong doing. It was just another childish attempt to sow discord among the saints. The fact that you have raised the same issues found in this blog reveals a willingness to be used by Satan and his evil workers. That you went to Powel before coming to any of the elders means that you have engaged in gossip.

It has been one year and eleven days since this accusation was made and I have yet to see this email which was evidently a cog in the big conspiracy wheel that was operating against Morey. A little over a month after Morey's initial accusation was sent to me and my elders at FCC John Powell (the "Powel" Morey referenced) sent me an email (dated 8/19/08). The subject line "FW: Send to anyone with questions. DENIAL???" The text:

Glenn, are you now denying that you sent this email to all of us?

Regards,

Jon

And below was an email that had been on my blog since July 29th (at this point, 21 days):

I have a question, if anyone knowns... Is this in response to the promise that we would get the $100,000 for the roof back? I think that i have more questions now than answers... *sigh*

Glenn

What I hadn't noticed until today was that I had mistyped the word "knows." What I had noticed, however, was that I had never denied writing this email. This claim makes no sense when you consider I replied with it to another email and 6 people (including Powell) received it. Also, if I posted it on my blog in the larger context of a chain of emails I had exchanged with Morey and others then why am I being asked if I was now denying that I wrote it?

The answer is simple really. Morey was desperate, caught in a lie. I had done nothing wrong, to him or anyone else. He apparently put Powell up to this to justify his false charge against me. My reply at the time was as follows:

Jon (and others),

Of course I do not deny sending out this letter:

-----Original Message-----
From: Glenn Hendrickson [mailto:glennhendrickson@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2008 7:15 PM
To: Nathaniel Watkins
Cc: Becky Groove; Miguel; Anita; Darren Bobier; Jon Powell
Subject: Re: Send to anyone with questions.

I have a question, if anyone knowns... Is this in response to the promise that we would get the $100,000 for the roof back? I think that i have more questions now than answers... *sigh*

Glenn

---------------

I assume that I am being asked this question in regard to Bob Morey's claim against me. Let's read Morey's assertion in an email from him to me dated July 17th, 2008 "John Powel has forwarded to me the email you sent to him that seeks to sow discord among the brethren about the air conditioner." Consider the following points (as I did) when asking yourself if Morey is describing the email I wrote (and have never once denied having written, btw):

1) Did I send John Powell an email? Yes I send him the above email, but it was not sent only to him. Nate, Becky, Miguel, Anita and Darren also received the same email. Morey's claim sounds as though I sent the email only to John, which is not the case at all. This is not the strongest point but it is worth considering in the big picture.

2) Did I seek to "sow discord among the brethren"? No. It is clear to an objective reader that my 2-sentence-long email did not seek to sow discord among anyone. Read it for what it says, it was a request for knowledge, for raw information. I jokingly added the comment about having more questions than answers because Morey sent out a list of questions rather than an answer to the one question we had. My humor may not have been understood but I did try to indicate that I had changed my tone slightly by adding asterisks around the word "sigh."

3) Did I mention an air-conditioner? Re-read Morey's claim about the email I supposedly wrote to Jon Powell and then re-read the email I quoted above. I did not mention anything about an air-conditioner. It is really that simple.

The email that Morey accused me of having written does not seem to be the email that I actually wrote. Either he has this email in mind and is lying about its content, or he has another email in mind which is fictional altogether. Either way he is lying.

I have nothing to hide and will be happy to correspond with anyone who has questions about these emails or the circumstances surrounding my resigning from FCC. My email address is glennhendrickson@gmail.com.

Now you might expect a reply with rational argumentation offering proof or some kind of rationale for why my 2 sentence email was the same one Morey had in mind when he first accused me on July 17. I would have been delighted to see a reply that challenged the points I offered. I got no such thing. Morey's reply doesn't sound like he read more than the first sentence before writing:

This is the email sent to me by Powell and to which I referred. Now that Glen has acknowledged that I was speaking the truth, he should apologize.

Dr. Bob

And Jon Powell's reply is telling of the kind of person you become under the tutelage of an abusive pastor:

Come one, come all!

What: the Hendickson Memorial Hanging
Where: the rubble of Faith Defenders building, 17601 Fitch, Irvine
When: high noon tomorrow
Why: Glenn is not sure what is "up" and what is "down"
How: by the feet, so that his massive intellect can leak out and he can once again get his bearings

*frown*
*cry*
*smile*
*sigh*

((((((^:

I would like to think that Jon was joking. Obviously he didn't hang me. He probably thought he was being clever in a typical Morey-esque fashion by omitting the "r" in my last name. All of that petty stuff aside, at this point I was done. I wrote back

I'm sorry, did I miss something Jon?

He never replied. I could only imagine what other inappropriate (yet all to common) Faith Defender cursing/name-twisting/etc I would have had to endure had he answered that question.

What strikes me as I read this after a year has gone by is the very different approaches taken to solving an accusation. I was the only person willing to examine ALL of the evidence in context and accept whatever conclusion the evidence led to. On my own I posted the entire email conversation between Morey and myself for all to see because I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Morey, Powell, and the rest of Morey's oft called "moreyites" do have much to be ashamed of. For in contrast to my willingness to rationally discuss this accusation they showed a spirit of mockery. I effect, they said "we're right and you're wrong. Don't confuse me with the evidence." I guess if truth doesn't matter to you you can take a few steps back from the computer screen, squint your eyes, and my emails magically say new and incriminating things!

Enough said about that (I did warn you about the dead horse I'd be beating).

Robert Morey has lied about me and has not offered any proof to substantiate his claims. The proof, if it existed, would be easy to offer. As easy as posting this mystery email (which actually fits the criteria of his accusation) to his blog. Well, we're at one year and counting. Morey is a bona fide liar. Thank God he resigned as pastor and closed FCC! I look forward to the day he apologizes to me (and all of the other people he's lied about and abused as a false pastor). Will that day ever come? God only knows. As for me, my conscience is clear and I have nothing to hide.

Exodus 20:16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Happy Birthday to ME!

Greetings readers. Just thought that y'all would like to know that today is my birthday. I'm 27 years old today. I'm celebrating by calling in sick from work. What might I be doing instead of work today you ask.... good question! well, call me old fashioned, but I'm actually sick so I'm just gonna be at home trying to feel better, haha.

If you want to help me celebrate I made a special birthday wishlist at amazon.com. Check it out:

Thanks for reading everyone!

Star Trek & Theology, Part 1

Currently listening to: The Dividing Line, May 26, 2009

In this episode Dr. White discusses Dr. Craig's teaching on middle knowledge (aka, molinism, Wikipedia, New Advent). Dr. Craig's site, Reasonable Faith, has many articles on God's knowledge, for those curious. Dr. White's website, aomin, has some resources as well:

• Middle Knowledge - Part 1 (by Tur8infan)
• Middle Knowledge - Part 2 (by Tur8infan)
• search for molinism on aomin

William Lane Craig says in the recording:

You can have a will in which your heirs and your beneficiaries are people who don't yet exist. You can denominate your grandchildren but then that's an open group to whoever happens to be your children's offspring. So that's a good analogy to this sort of corporate idea... and once you begin to look at the New Testament in this light you see all kinds of corporate images. Think of the olive tree with the branches grafted in or broken off, or the building of living stones, or the priesthood of believers...

Dr. White points out that this corporate notion is no doubt present. However, the identity of the individuals are 1) known by God and 2) chosen by God. This is the issue here. Dr. Craig, then, shifts to the doctrine of molinism in order to escape the logical result of the idea of corporate election:

...or the sheepfold, or the body with its many members and parts. There are all kinds of these corporate images in the New Testament that I think, seen in this light, makes good sense.

Now, I do think that there can be a kind of individual election if you have a middle knowledge, or molinist, perspective in that God knew exactly who would respond to His grace in what circumstances. So in one sense, in virtue of choosing to create certain people and place them in those circumstance, He knew who would freely be saved and who would freely not be saved. So God has chosen a world in which these people are placed in these circumstances and as a result they freely place their faith in Christ Jesus and are saved. That's a kind of predestination, if you will, but it's one that is fully compatible with human freedom.

White comments that it is astounding the lengths that people will go to in order to get around granting the fact that God brings about the entirety of salvation. He points out that when Dr. Craig says that God chooses to create certain people he is making that decision based on His middle knowledge of what those people will do and what they will not do. In other words, God is ultimately to thank/blame/etc for they way in which things play out because he chose a world that would bring about his desired end. Pressed to this end, molinism/middle knowledge does not seem to maintain the integrity of human (libertarian) freedom that Dr. Craig (and its other proponents) asserts.

Commenting on the above clip, Dr. White says:

Did you catch that? "God," not "has decreed a world." "God [in His middle knowledge, of all of these worlds that could exist peopled with certain mixtures of people who would do certain things in certain ways] has chosen a world" where they will freely do this"... and if they chose not to freely do this that world in which that person lives does not get created. I'm sorry, this is Star Trek stuff, alright? This is Star Trek, Next Generation, Enterprise, in the final thing where like 16 of them appear and they're all talking to each other and there's all these different time lines and God chose one of those where everything worked out the way He wanted it to, but without a sovereign decree. And what's the overriding purpose in all of this? As if any inspired writer ever believed anything like this, or thought of anything like this? Libertarian free will, the ultimate theological commitment of the synergist.

Don't you love people who talk in long paragraphs? :P Well, as chance would have it (that is, if you believe in that kind of thing) I have seen this episode of Star Trek (and, as usual, the title of this blog starts to make sense after like 5 minutes of reading). It is in season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 11, titled "Parallels" (memory-alpha, startrek.com). Briefly, Worf returns from a bat'leth tournament and shortly realizes that things are out of place. It starts with a picture in the wrong place, his recollection of events are not corroborated by his colleagues. It turns out that he is shifting in between different realities which are posited to exist parallel to their own. This shifts are being caused by a quantum fissure which Data helps us (the viewers) to understand in this dialog (source):

DATA
I believe the quantum fissure we
discovered is a fixed point across
the space-time continuum -- a
"keyhole" that intersects many
different quantum realities.

TROI
What do you mean by "quantum
realities"?

DATA
For any event, there is an
infinite number of possible
outcomes. Our choices determine
which outcome will follow. But
there is a theory in quantum
physics that all possibilities
that could happen do happen in
alternate quantum realities.

Data indicates Riker, who is sitting at the head of the
table.

DATA
(continuing)
For instance, in a different
quantum reality, Captain Riker may
have chosen to sit at the other
end of the table. While in
another reality, the Captain may
be standing.

BEVERLY
(onto idea)
So at this moment, there are an
infinite number of Enterprises...
and an infinite number of Doctor
Crushers having this discussion.


DATA
Yes. Although on some of those
Enterprises, there may not be a
Doctor Crusher...

WORF
And somehow I have been shifting
from one reality to another...

DATA
That is correct.

The scene which Dr. White was referring to is at the end of this YouTube clip and continues in this one. The analogy between molinism and the theory of reality portrayed in this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is uncanny. Granted, the closest thing the show has to God is Q and he wasn't in this episode, the analogy is not perfect, but the overlap is undeniable. Both molinism and the philosophy behind Star Trek grant human beings (and, I assume humanoid aliens) freedom. This freedom is more or less in accord with the idea of libertarian free will.

From our perspective reality is reality, but in both molinism and Star Trek it is granted as true that other realities exist and ours is ours for a reason. William Lane Craig seems to contend that our reality is real (i.e. the way things should be) because God chose it to accomplish what He wanted. In the episode, Parallels, the crew of the Enterprise determined that sending Worf back to the Enterprise from his original reality would restore things to the way they should be (with no comment as to any higher power directing or preferring one reality against the next).

Star Trek is replete with instances where the viewers are treated to stories of alternate timelines and parallel universes. In my humble opinion, this is what makes science fiction great. Not only is it the best entertainment the 24th century has to offer, for us in the 21st century it gives us all sorts of questions and ideas to ponder. In this case we are examining the nature of reality, time, God's knowledge, the nature of human freedom, and whether or not Worf and Deanna Troi will ever fall in love.

In answering these questions I believe that a sober examination of Scripture will yield the best results. That, in the end, is where the battle lies for questions pertaining to God's knowledge, election, freedom, etc.