Magic Statistics

Check this out: A reporter conducts an interview with Bono, lead singer for U2, and asks him a general question about religion. Bono responds that religions are generally based on karma: you get what you deserve (i.e., in Christian language, judgment based on works). Then he goes on to say that, if this is true, he's doomed:

But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s—. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

Then the reporter says, "The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that." Bono tells him how liberating it is to believe in Jesus: "The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That's the point."

But the interviewer still can't accept it: "Such great hope is wonderful, even though it's close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world's great thinkers. But Son of God, isn't that farfetched?" And Bono persists, giving the well-known C.S. Lewis argument that Christ was either lunatic, liar, or Lord.

No, it's not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn't allow you that. He doesn't let you off that hook.

Bono turned the reporter's general question about religion into a presentation of the gospel message. Way to go!

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Science Cartoons Plus

This would be very interesting, if that's really what's been found. But in view of recent problems with another alleged finding, perhaps it would be best to wait and see.

via Bourque.

The Rt Rev N.T. (Tom) Wright, Bishop of Durham and New Testament scholar extraordinaire, visited Seattle Pacific University in May, when he gave four lectures on the theme of Christian Engagement with the Post-Modern World. Complete transcripts of the four lectures are now available here.

The subject of one of the lectures was The Da Vinci Code. Rev Wright says that Dan Brown's book stands in a long line of speculative literature that presents alleged secret traditions that Jesus was just a man, and not divine as orthodox Christianity teaches. But if Brown is right, then why, asks Wright, would anyone today care about Jesus? "If he was a teacher who married, had children, then got divorced and remarried, what's so special about him?" Rev Wright suggests that Brown is posing an elaborate fantasy to justify his desire to escape from traditional Roman Catholicism.

Mr Brown claims that the historical and architectural information in his book is all accurate. But Rev Wright points out that Brown makes elementary error after elementary error in his descriptions of the physical layout and environs of one of the churches featured in The Da Vinci Code—Westminster Abbey. "Ten minutes' observation by a junior research assistant could have put all this right. If Brown is so careless, and carelessly inventive, in details as easy to check as those, why should we trust him in anything else?"

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Rev Wright's lecture is that he puts The Da Vinci Code in the big picture: Mr Brown's book fits into a contemporary liberal model of Jesus and Christian origins which is being taught at seminaries all across North America and Europe. According to this modern view, the truth about Jesus is found in the scores of gospels and epistles that the church ruthlessly suppressed in favour of the canonical New Testament documents. The latter were not even written until centuries after Jesus died. Jesus was not the divine Son of God who came to sacrifice himself, and he certainly was not raised from the dead. He did not come to found a new religion, but rather to deliver beautiful and inspirational moral and spiritual teaching.

In response to this widespread and popular view, Rev Wright first of all gives sound historical and literary reasons for rejecting the view that the canonical New Testament documents were written later than the "Gospel of Thomas" and the other, suppressed documents. But the most devastating criticism is that

[t]hose who were thrown to the lions were not reading "Thomas" or "Q" or the "Gospel of Mary". They were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the rest, and being sustained thereby in a subversive mode of faith and life which, growing out of apocalyptic Judaism, posed a far greater threat to Roman empire and pagan worldviews than Cynic philosophy or Gnostic spirituality ever could. Why would Caesar worry about people rearranging their private spiritualities?

The neo-Gnosticism championed by Dan Brown and the liberal view of Jesus is not a religion of redemption. On the contrary, it is a worldview that appeals to pride—"I want to discover the real me". The challenge of Christianity is that we should look not to ourselves but to God. We must not forget that Christianity is rooted in real historical events, not post-modern neo-Gnostic fantasies.

Read the whole thing.