Stetzer: Christians Need to Repent for Conspiracy Theories (I agree)

Ed Stetzer is a conservative evangelical Christian and the executive director of the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. He's an expert on and practitioner of Christian evangelism. He's also no mean theologian and social thinker. I really respect this guy.

Here is a piece he just published in 'Christianity Today' about the need for Christians, in this hyper-mediated and polarized era, to stop spouting conspiracy theories. Stetzer is right, I think, in calling this a violation of what we Lutherans know as the Eighth Commandment: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."

In the Small Catechism, Martin Luther explains the meaning of this commandment for a Christian's daily conduct:

We should fear and love God so that we do not betray, slander, lie, or gossip about our neighbors, but defend them, speak well of them, and put the most charitable construction on all that they do.

Just because you're suspicious of someone on the right, or the left, or the middle, or somewhere else on the spectrum, doesn't mean that the bad things you hear about them must be true.

Our social compact is being daily eroded by loose ships sharing hot tips, not so much by major news outlets, most of whose journalists and editors work hard to corroborate good and bad news, but by ordinary citizens passing on the latest conspiracy theory on Facebook or Twitter. (I'm especially sensitive about this because my grandfather spouted all sorts of conspiracy theories when I was a kid. Because he was my grandfather, I believed what he said and often re-spouted them at school, only to be acquainted with the documented facts by good teachers.)

As a lifelong student of history, it's my observation that most conspiracies that involve more than four people eventually crack. If the conspiracy was nefarious, somebody talks to the right person, or takes money to betray the other conspirators or to write a tell-all, or to get revenge, or to look like a hero. In short, most "conspiracies" aren't.

Be that as it may, Stetzer is right: We Christians have a lot of repenting to do on this point.

As to counsel for the future, I turn again to Luther, who said that when we hear items of gossip (like conspiracy theories), we should let our ears be their tomb. Bury them; don't spread them.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Resurrection Conspiracy?

"[After the Roman soldiers who had been at Jesus' tomb and witnessed an angel announce Jesus' resurrection to several disciples, they went to Jewish religious authorities. They presumably did so in hopes that they could protect them from the wrath of Roman governor Pilate.] ...the religious leaders...came up with a plan: They took a large sum of money and gave it to the soldiers, bribing them to say, 'His disciples came in the night and stole the body while we were sleeping...The soldiers took the bribe and did as they were told..." (Matthew 28:12-13, 15, The Message)

Conspiracies always break down.

The lie that Jesus hadn't risen but that His body had been stolen, cooked up by the priests, who knew from the soldiers' testimony that Jesus had risen from the dead, couldn't be sustained. Conspiracies never can be. Someone always cracks. Someone always lets the cat out of the bag. So, it is with this conspiracy designed to suppress the truth that Jesus Christ had risen, hatched on the first Easter Sunday.

But the conspirators' lie contrasts with the message of the angel who met several of Jesus female followers earlier that day and the message of Jesus' resurrection carried from the tomb by those women. It wasn't a lie designed to keep people out of trouble. It was a truth that was bound to get anyone who believed and bore witness to it in trouble.

In spite of threats, persecution, ridicule, and the murder of believers though, none of the early Christian disciples "cracked."

Elsewhere in the New Testament, the apostle Paul, himself once a skeptic and later a witness of the risen Jesus, says that more than 500 disciples saw Jesus after His resurrection. None, that we know of, ever changed their story under pressure.

That's pretty remarkable when you consider that they had all pretty much fled from their fellow Jews and their Roman overlords or had stayed at a distance when Jesus was arrested, tried, and executed.

How to explain this sudden and sustained courage in the face of disdain and death threats?

It's this. They weren't in on a conspiracy to trick the world into believing that Jesus rose. There wouldn't have been anything in it for them--no power, no prestige, no wealth--to incite them to engage them in such a conspiracy anyway.

The powers of that time and place--the first century Judean equivalents of Church and State--and public opinion were against them and against their Messiah, Who by His refusal to fight and His acceptance of death, had offended some and disappointed others.

On the first Easter, a conspiracy was hatched. It's been exposed. It was the conspiracy of some power-hungry religious leaders threatened by the Savior of the world and some Roman soldiers.

On the first Easter, Christ rose and the evidence--in the courageous witness with nothing to gain by proclaiming Christ risen and in the lives of billions still being changed daily by following Christ--says that it really happened.

Help me today, Lord, to never turn tail and run, but to lift up the risen Jesus. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

'The Onion' NASA conspiracy guy no different from the 'Jesus never existed' people...Goofy

The next time a friend hits you with a conspiracy theory, tell them that they sound as silly as this guy.

Slow-Witted Conspiracy Theorist Convinced Government Behind NASA
Posted by The Onion on Friday, June 12, 2015

Most conspiracy theorists are as goofy as this one presented by the satirists at The Onion. Whether they're the Truthers claiming that 9/11 was an act of the US government, the assassination conspiracists who say that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone in killing John F. Kennedy, or that small band of ill-informed New Atheists who claim that Jesus Christ never existed, this is how conspiracy theorists sound: Heedless of facts, intellectually challenged, lacking in common sense.

Don't misunderstand. Conspiracies are hatched all the time. But eventually, conspiracies that do exist, are found out, especially big ones involving lots of people. Someone talks. Motives change.

And big conspiracies have an especially short shelf life in our hyper-mediated age. You can get away with being a white woman who claims to be black for a little while, for example, but eventually the digital trail leads to your door.

Conspiracies usually fall apart under the weight of counter-incentives. In other words, a group of people may hatch a conspiracy. But when potential pay-offs or the threat of prison or death come along, the conspiracy falls apart. Someone cracks.

This is why the present assertions from some that Jesus never existed are absurd. It posits a gigantic conspiracy surrounding the Christian message: that God was born into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, that He led a perfect life, that He died on a cross, that He rose from the dead, and that He ascended into heaven, where He lives now. (And that all who repent and believe in Jesus have life with God.)

The New Testament reports that thousands saw Jesus. It also reports that more than 500 people encountered Him after He rose from the dead.

If all of it--Jesus' life, His resurrection, and everything else--is a big conspiracy, it would be one of the world's strangest.

Why?

Because none of its "perpetrators" had anything to gain, from spouting such a message if it weren't true.

And they had everything to lose: their lives, whatever property they possessed, their chances for success.

Agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman does not accept the Lordship of Jesus, nor His divinity.

But he recently wrote an interesting piece making mincemeat of the assertions of some of today's New Atheists that Jesus didn't exist.

Here's a portion of what he wrote in response to these conspiracy theorists on The Huffinton Post:

With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul) -- sources that originated in Jesus' native tongue Aramaic and that can be dated to within just a year or two of his life (before the religion moved to convert pagans in droves). Historical sources like that are pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind. Moreover, we have relatively extensive writings from one first-century author, Paul, who acquired his information within a couple of years of Jesus' life and who actually knew, first hand, Jesus' closest disciple Peter and his own brother James. If Jesus did not exist, you would think his brother would know it.  

Moreover, the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on every ground. The alleged parallels between Jesus and the "pagan" savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions).  

Moreover, aspects of the Jesus story simply would not have been invented by anyone wanting to make up a new Savior. The earliest followers of Jesus declared that he was a crucified messiah. But prior to Christianity, there were no Jews at all, of any kind whatsoever, who thought that there would be a future crucified messiah. The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who overthrew the enemy. Anyone who wanted to make up a messiah would make him like that. Why did the Christians not do so? 

Because they believed specifically that Jesus was the Messiah. And they knew full well that he was crucified. The Christians did not invent Jesus. They invented the idea that the messiah had to be crucified. [Here, I disagree with Ehrman. While Jewish popular culture didn't accept the idea of a crucified Messiah, I believe that such a Messiah is anticipated in the Old Testament.]

One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our modern and post-modern cultural despisers of established religion (or not). But surely the best way to promote any such agenda is not to deny what virtually every sane historian on the planet -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, atheist, what have you -- has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence.  

Whether we like it or not, Jesus certainly existed.

The theory that the assertion of Jesus' existence is all the result of some elaborate conspiracy, is no different from all the other silly conspiracy theories that people use to deny reality. And like many such conspiracy theories, deeply destructive and ignorant.

Saturday This and That

These are some of the things that caught my eye this past week.

Ever wonder what that extra shoelace hole is for?
It isn't just for show.

Are fountain pens the next big thing?
In A Primer on Fountain Pens, Brett and Kate McKay share the writing instrument's history and tell us why, at times, they should be our instrument of choice for writing. Somehow, I don't see the fountain pen taking off as a fad.

Denzel Washington's recommended number 1 priority for college graduates...
...put God first.

Letter to JetBlue...
...from the grateful mother of an autistic child.

"How is it that really, really smart people can come to believe really, really stupid things?"...
...The revered journalist, Seymour Hersh, seems to have been looking for the "big story" for decades and, in the process, produced some embarrassments, including his just released story alleging that Osama bin Laden's death was less of an American achievement than a Pakistani government gift. Marc Ambinder suggests that, in his long journalistic career, Hersh has often been right on facts, but often way off when taking about motive, leading him to believe crazy things.

The US is "less Christian"...
...so says a new study.

But the sky is not falling...
...So shows Ed Stetzer.

The US restaurant business is stagnant...
...because millennials don't go to restaurants as much as preceding generations did. One factor that might explain this, not mentioned in the article, is the plethora of cooking shows. Cooking has become fun and hip, whereas in previous generations regarded it as a necessity and a chore. So, millennials might actually prefer eating their own cooking at home.

$179.3-million is no abstraction...
...That's how much Picasso's Women of Algiers brought in at an auction this past week.

Has the decline of baseball...
...corresponded with the decline of American character?

Hillary would, if he weren't a competitor, likely advise Jeb to watch out for questions...
...Clinton has only answered eight from the media since her campaign began, preferring to take questions from folks at town meetings. On the other hand, Bush's most challenging questions have come from "ordinary" voters, not the media, and as he answers them, seems to get himself into increasingly deeper waters. I wrote here:

While it may be in a candidate's interest to speak to the press, Clinton isn't legally bound to do so. If she wants to reach the public with town hall meetings, advertising, conventional campaigning, and social media releases, that's her choice. But it's likely to backfire on her...

Now, Bush seems to be showing us that answering any question from anybody can produce its own backfires.

While I recognize that there's a good chance that anyone who runs for president is either (a) filled with megalomania or (b) racked by feelings of inferiority, I nonetheless feel badly about the meat grinding analysis and tedious verbal parsing to which all candidates for the country's highest office are subjected.

A legend has died...
...B.B. King passed on Thursday. Love this article about him from USA Today.