KONY 2012

Last week my wife was on Facebook and she asked me “What’s Coney 2012?” I told her I had no idea what she was talking about. I few days later I saw something in the news about KONY 2012, so the two of us watched the video:

Our first reaction was kind of scratching our heads. We were familiar with Invisible Children. We saw their first documentary several years ago at church. But something just seemed very off about this video. I appreciate that they’re willing to dedicate their lives to helping other people, but the cutesy hipster vibe of the film with college fists in the air around the world seemed a far cry from reality. Lots, and lots of articles have popped up since then confirming that the situation is much more complex than the video naively implies.

But our lasting reaction has been a sobering reflection that Invisible Children started out as 3 Christians seeking to live out their faith in Christ and has ended in an organization with a worldwide mouthpiece that has erased Christ from their lips. In an effort to “make Kony famous” they have neglected to make God famous (“hallowed be your name,” we pray). Contrary to their first film, God is never mentioned or even hinted at once in the 30 minute film that has now been seen by 100 million people (the most successful viral video in history). Is that really something to get excited about? I don’t mean to single these Christians out. Lord knows that the rest of us aren’t much better at stepping out in faith to proclaim God’s name. But with all the attention and hype the video has received, it’s worth reflecting upon the thoughts of other Christians in Africa:

Justice is not only going to happen when our oppressor is captured and taken to The Hague, there are many leaders in Uganda who have done far worse atrocities and qualify as well to go to the Hague even before Kony but no one seems to say anything about them. Justice is going to happen if we the oppressed are restored and given living hope. This hope is what the oppressor took; taking the life of the oppressor does not bring back any hope. I have realized that hope is not in the cows, land, food or other material things we owned, because when Kony took all these from us, we lost hope and life was meaningless.  Hope is in life eternal, hope is in Christ. This hope no man can take.

KONY 2012, a survivor’s perspective

Jesus defeated evil by laying down his life.  Christians today can not defeat evil by pushing a share button or attending a fundraiser.  Those are good things, but at some level a bigger sacrifice is required.  To build schools and bring clean water, to protect the widow and orphan, to care for the environment creatively so that food and fuel are adequate to sustain life, to embody the love of Jesus in a way that the poor can hear and see and touch and be transformed.  I know this sounds hard, and I don’t mean it to sound self-righteous.  We struggle with this issues, with our natural tendency to walk across the road and ignore the beat-up man on the ground.  I hope the excitement and awareness of this generation will propel hundreds and thousands to turn away from a life devoted to comfort and enter into the hard and dangerous work of teaching and healing and preaching.

On Kony and Viruses

So before you send $30 to Invisible Children for your “action kit”, consider sending $30 to those preaching and proclaiming God’s name in Africa.

A Letter From Kabwata (Conrad Mbewe)
ARBCA Update
Gifts for His Glory

Inductive vs Deductive Bible Study

I’ve heard people refer to “inductive bible study” but never really had a firm understanding of what was meant or how it differed from a deductive bible study. In looking for a definition, I came across a very helpful article called Inductive and Deductive Bible Studies by Harvey Bluedorn. I don’t know much of anything about the author, other than he appears to be the father of Nathan Bluedorn, whom I met very briefly at a film festival a few years ago. Nathan is the author of the Fallacy Detective book series http://www.christianlogic.com/ (and I believe he is influenced by Gordon Clark’s writings, but don’t quote me on that).

Bluedorn is very helpful in that he explains that inductive and deductive study is not the same thing as inductive and deductive reasoning:

As you can see, we aren’t actually talking about a method of reasoning so much as we are talking about a method of approaching a subject.

Here is his conclusion. I welcome comments:

“Deductive or synthetic Bible study gathers propositions from Scripture and arranges them as premises in formal arguments which reason toward necessary doctrinal conclusions which may not otherwise have been stated in the Bible. In this way, it builds Biblical doctrine. On the basic level, the gathering and arranging of Scripture to prove doctrines has already been done for the student. On the advanced level, the student researches these on his own.

Inductive or analytic Bible study examines in detail large passages of Scripture in order to understand those passages in context. In this way, it builds a general understanding of the Bible. On the basic level, the student researches on his own. On the advanced level, the student surveys all or large portions of Scripture looking for patterns, and theorizes about the meaning of what he observes. He then goes back and attempts to prove his theory deductively.

So inductive and deductive study go hand in hand. Inductive study supplies the analytical Bible knowledge and understanding necessary to deductively build Bible doctrine, and deductive study researches and builds doctrine which informs inductive study concerning the wider doctrinal context of Scripture which then enables inductive study thereby to draw out even more meaning from the text.

The weakness of inductive study is its limitations in building doctrine, and the weakness of deductive study is its susceptibility to being infected with dogma.

The abuse of inductive study comes when theory is turned into dogma, and the abuse of deductive study comes when dogma is mixed with doctrine.”

 

The Love of the World

Good thoughts from James White on the reaction to Kirk Cameron’s comments about homosexuality:

God may well be forcibly ripping us away from our love of the world by allowing the hatred of that world to express itself in ever more visible, and painful, ways.