Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

There’s this powerful series of promises in Ezekiel chapter 36, given by God to His people in captivity in Babylon. He’s about to bring them back to Palestine. Here’s some of what He says:

I will . . . come to help you because I have a concern for you (verse 9).

I will . . . bring you back, not because you deserve it, but to protect my holy name—the name you have dishonoured while scattered abroad (22).

I will . . . show how holy my name is when I reveal it through you before the eyes of the other nations (23).

I will . . . sprinkle you with clean water and you shall be clean, your filth will be washed away (25).

I will . . . “give you a new heart with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony heart of sin and give you a new, obedient heart. And I will put my Spirit in you so you will obey my laws and do whatever I command” (Ezekiel 36:26, 27, NLT).

I will . . . be your God and you will be my people (28).

I will . . . care for you with good crops, fields that can again be farmed, cities will be rebuilt, people will want to live in them (30-36).

I will . . . do this, not because you deserve it. In fact, you should be ashamed of what you have done, but I will cleanse you of your sins (32, 33).

I will . . . do it because I have promised. Everyone will know I am the Lord (36, 38).

God is always the initiator, we the recipients. Of course, we can choose to accept or reject His offers. Reject? How sad would that be?

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

In the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, one character, aptly named Kris Kringle, claims he’s Santa Claus. It’s a claim that gets him sent to a psychiatric institution and to court. The film is about those who have or don’t have faith in Santa Claus. Faith is described as “believing what you know is not so.”

An episode of All in the Family, the TV series that ran for nine years from 1971, has Archie Bunker say faith is “what you wouldn’t believe for your life if it wasn’t in the Bible.”

A 2006 CNN special entitled “What is a Christian” had a voiceover during the credits that said, “After all, if you’ve got the truth, it’s not really faith at all.”

Each of these comments—separated by decades—talk about faith as if it has no substance in reality, as if faith is something only irrational people take on board.

Dallas Willard, in Knowing Christ Today, says we’re in the midst of a “great historical struggle between what might be called ‘traditional’ knowledge, represented by the church, and modern knowledge represented by science” that has brought us to the place where so many see religion “as mere belief or commitment.”

This has made all traditional and religious “knowledge” as illusion and superstition, with real “knowledge” reserved for “subject matters of mathematics and the ‘natural’ sciences—and questionably, to that of the ‘social’ or ‘human’ sciences.”

The problem here is Christianity has uncovered the reality of a God who cares. There’s solid evidence of a Jesus, known as the Christ; and of an empty tomb that began a movement. It’s a movement not devoid of rational thinking, but that demonstrably helped establish scientific methodology.

Not all knowledge is found in the sciences. Never will be. To have real knowledge of love, for instance, you have to experience it.

Willard gives this challenge: “To know Christ in the contemporary world our opponents must see people and communities of people in which He lives today.”

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

Popular author Anne Rice recently announced she’d quit Christianity. She wrote on Facebook that she refused to be anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science and anti-life any longer. This, she feels, is what Christianity has become.

She adds she’s left Christianity, not Christ: “My commitment to Christ remains at the heart and centre of my life.” She plans to attend church to pray in private, “as long as nobody there is offended by my presence,” she told the Los Angeles Times.

Rice wrote about vampires (The Vampire Chronicles series of novels) before it became popular to do so. She wrote these books as a “pessimistic atheist.” She says, “Those novels are all about what it’s like to live in a very dark world, a meaningless world. . . . I can’t go back to that, I don’t believe that anymore.” Now she writes about angels.

Still, she’s walked away from organised Christianity, and in doing so she’s identified three issues Christians need to address.

1. Without attempting to defend or challenge her “anti” list, it shows a major tragedy with today’s Christianity. What Christians stand for is being drowned out by what they are perceived to stand against. God must weep at this.
2. She says it’s impossible for her to belong to this “quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious . . . group.” So many Christian groups act like dysfunctional school children when there needs to be respect and honour for one another—1 Corinthians 13 is a good guide.
3. Finally, she asks whether “the decisions of people in organised religion are related to any deep-rooted theology of Jesus Christ.” Is it stating the obvious when we say Jesus Christ must be central for those who are Christ-ians?

I’m sorry Rice feels she has to walk away from Christianity because it’s best experienced in a healthy body of Christ (the church). I hope she discovers one soon.