"Bishop" Brian Tamaki

It’s not common to find a well resourced and organised, well presented, enthusiastically socially proactive, theologically conservative (for the most part) and outspoken Christian church in New Zealand. The combination of all four is a rare commodity. So in recent history when Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church showed up, it naturally attracted a lot of attention, both good and bad. It was all of those things – plus a few other things. But in part because of those four things all together, it was like a lighthouse for a number of disenfranchised Christians who felt that other churches really weren’t going to make the kind of difference they wanted to see.

Added to this package, however, were a few other things – things often seen as the darker side of some Pentecostal churches. There had always been an intense focus on the church’s leadership, in this case just one man, Brian Tamaki, who took the title “bishop” in spite of the church not having an episcopal leadership model. All of the church’s publicity, including its own television broadcasts, were centred on one individual. Mr Tamaki was at the centre not because of any qualifications that made him knowledgeable or especially skilled at anything in particular, but rather because of the belief that he is God’s chosen man. A very strong emphasis in Mr Tamaki’s teaching on submission to church leadership (I’ll never forget – “If you don’t have a pastor, you’re heading for disaster”) was also a concern for many, as it raised the spectre of unquestionable authority, or at very least the sustained focus on such submission suggested an unhealthy imbalance towards human authority. It’s also a common feature in charismatic movements like this – and Destiny is no exception – that a great deal of authority to teach the Christian faith is vested in those who at times almost seem to flaunt the fact that they have no theological training. Such, we might be told sometimes, is the stuff of old stuffy religious people in ivory towers, all we really need is a strong leadership above us, a leadership that is in touch with God. In the eyes of many, it’s like a 16 year old boy with no licence being given the fastest car in town. A respect for one’s teaching that has not been earned, but which is taken very seriously by the flock.
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I have my share of concerns about the way some Christians view marriage and whether or not those views are really biblical, but that’s not what this blog post is about. Vorjack over at “Unreasonable Faith” has challenged the familiar appeal that Christians sometimes make to “biblical marriage” in their rejection of same-sex unions. He claims that this appeal is defective because marriage doesn’t just mean one thing in the Bible, it means eight different things. He writes,

Here’s a summary:
1.Polygynous Marriage
Probably the most common form of marriage in the bible, it is where a man has more than one wife.
2.Levirate Marriage
When a woman was widowed without a son, it became the responsibility of the brother-in-law or a close male relative to take her in and impregnate her. If the resulting child was a son, he would be considered the heir of her late husband. See Ruth, and the story of Onan (Gen. 38:6-10).
3.A man, a woman and her property — a female slave
The famous “handmaiden” sketch, as preformed by Abraham (Gen. 16:1-6) and Jacob (Gen. 30:4-5).
4.A man, one or more wives, and some concubines
The definition of a concubine varies from culture to culture, but they tended to be live-in mistresses. Concubines were tied to their “husband,” but had a lower status than a wife. Their children were not usually  heirs, so they were safe outlets for sex without risking the line of succession. To see how badly a concubine could be treated, see the famous story of the Levite and his concubine (Judges 19:1-30).
5.A male soldier and a female prisoner of war
Women could be taken as booty from a successful campaign and forced to become wives or concubines. Deuteronomy 21:11-14 describes the process.
6.A male rapist and his victim
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 describes how an unmarried woman who had been raped must marry her attacker.
7.A male and female slave
A female slave could be married to a male slave without consent, presumably to produce more slaves.
and of course …
8.Monogamous, heterosexual marriage
What you might think of as the standard form of marriage, provided you think of arranged marriages as the standard. Also remember that inter-faith or cross-ethnic marriage were forbidden for large chunks of biblical history.
The important thing to realize here is that none of these models are described as better than any other. All appear to have been accepted.
So there you go. The next time someone says that we need to stick with biblical marriage in this country, you can ask them which of the eight kinds they would prefer, and why.

Someone who’s unwilling to be a cheerleader for scepticism but who actually a) knows enough to know whether or not the claims being made align with the facts and b) recognises poor reasoning when they see it, isn’t going to be impressed by this. But the reality is, material like this more often than not appears on websites or blogs where the visitors are likely to be vistors to the site because of their hostility to Christianity, and will be gleefully received as ammunition without much effort being taken to check its reliability. I’m sure similar things happen at some Chistian websites too. I should say, too, that it is possible that Vorjack isn’t trying to be dishonest. He is merely reproducing material from another source – albeit with some additions of his own. I doubt that he is deliberately lying. I still say, however, that when you’re in a position to produce material to a large audience and peddle it as fact, you have a responsibility to exercise some care. This certainly wasn’t done in this case.
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It’s a little known fact that between his stints at Calvin College and the University of Notre Dame, Alvin Plantinga had a brief cameo in a monster movie where he terrorised tourists at the Taj Mahal.

See here for an explanation of what possessed me to do this.

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Not too long ago I announced that there were some changes afoot. Although we’re keen supporters of homeschooling, we started sending our children to a nearby very small Christian school and my wife was going to look for work. It had become clear that there just wasn’t time available for me to work on writing, publishing, and generally putting in the work required to work towards the kind of academic role I’m looking for, plus another income wouldn’t go astray.

It will come as no surprise that I’m a firm believer in the providence of God, so it’s only appropriate that I’m now very thankful to God for the way things are turning out. Just a matter of days after deciding to send the children to school Ruth was given a job at a nearby rest home / hospital, working between 19.5 and 30 hours per week, give or take a little. Within a week of this happening, I got a change of hours at work approved, meaning that soon I’ll be working four days per week. The way New Zealand’s welfare and tax system works means that we’re only slightly better off financially than before (but hey, slightly is better than not at all). The other side to that is that we’re earning a much higher proportion of our income, which is much better. Also, although the change of hours at work has been approved, there is a project at work that I need to make myself available for (one that we’ve been planning for a while), so the new hours won’t kick in for a little while yet, but it’s pretty much a done deal. Also, I have exams on the 16th and 17th of November, so initially what extra time I have will be spent preparing for those. But the upshot is that we’re doing a little better now and I will have more time available to work on my own projects, which is what we had hoped for.

I had expected that this process would take a couple of months, but from start to finish it took only a couple of weeks. Think me terribly superstitious if you will, but I’m calling it a sign.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow
Praise Him, all creatures here below
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

EDIT: I’ve started putting some of my music clips up at YouTube, and this one is apropros here!

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I don’t usually mention it when I add a new blog to the list of blogs on the right hand side of this page. If I like a blog, I usually just add it, and if you happen to be checking out the blogs that I follow, you’ll discover it.

I didn’t want to risk people not seeing this one. I’ve just added Quodlibeta to the blog list. Here’s how they describe the blog:

The Latin word Quodlibeta means “whatever you like” and refers to the special occasions at medieval universities when the students (or clerks as they were known) could test their masters by asking any question they fancied. This blog is primarily concerned with religion, science, history and their interface. But like the medieval clerks, we reserve the right to post on anything we want.

It’s the blog of James Hannaam, Humphrey Clarke, Jim S (if “S” is indeed his surname) and J.D. Walters. The authors are eminently qualified, the subject matter is thoroughly fascinating, the delivery is first rate, and I’ll be checking in on a regular basis.

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A parliamentary committee has recommended that the partial defence of provocation should be abolished. I explained in an earlier blog why that’s a bad idea.

However, the responses that the members of parliament have given to the very sensible concerns over the abolition of this partial defence confirm my worst fears about the whole process: They really don’t understand the laws they are trying to have changed. It’s the anti-smacking law all over again.

One concern raised was that the abolition of the provocation defence is an affront to women who have been subjected to years of abuse at the hands of their partners.  The glib reply of the parliamentary committee to this concern is shocking in its level of both expressed ignorance and injustice: “It would be more appropriate for them to rely on self-defence, which could result in an acquittal rather than a manslaughter conviction.”

Self defence? No. They really ought to have spoken to a few lawyers or judges in this process. The actions of a battered spouse who lashes out do not meet the legal criteria of self defence by virtue of the fact that the spouse is a battered one. No woman in a New Zealand court has been found not guilty by virtue of self defence on account of being a battered wife. It is also highly dubious as far as justice is concerned to assume that a woman who kills her husband and who is a battered spouse should be acquitted rather than receive a lesser conviction.

Not only would such a course of action not “be more appropriate,” but 1) It is very unlikely to ever succeed at all, and 2) his highly questionable on ethical grounds.

What is more, the parliamentary committee has also (whether they intended to or not) granted that they are attempting to seek a change that makes little difference. The new report says:

The committee’s report said that the law change would still allow judges to consider provocation as a mitigating factor in sentencing.

This would mean in extreme cases someone found guilty of murder could get less than life imprisonment if the judge believed that sentence was “manifestly unjust”.

In other words, instead of a reduced conviction, showing that provocation was a factor would result in a reduced sentence. When the provocation defence was highlighted when it was falsely appealed to by convicted murder Clayton Weatherston, outspoken politicans and media personalities were all but frothing at the mouth at this terrible defence that people were using as an “excuse” for murder (setting aside the ignorance involved there – it was never an excuse in law). Now the reformulated version of this outrage is that provocation can serve as a mitigating factor in obtaining a lesser sentence. Somehow that doesn’t draw the howls of outrage.

It’s a meaningless exercise that has done little but change labels around. The partial defence of provocation should remain because it is fundamentally just. This is just another case where politicians are taking away the clarity of the law and loading the scales more in favour of the “discretion” of the system.

Glenn Peoples

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I liked Google already, but now I have another reason to like their search engine. It has evolved to the point where you start typing what you’re about to search for in the search box, and it starts making suggestions based on common searches people make and based on the content of the sites Google indexes (actually I’m not 100% sure what it’s based on, but those two ideas make sense to me).

I just entered my name into the Google search engine (and don’t act like you’ve never done it), without using speech makrs to narrow the search down, and before I even searched for anything, this is what Google suggested (the text in the top box is what I just typed, the rest is the three suggestions that Google made):

I understand the glenn peoples billboard suggestion, because there’s a Glenn Peoples at coolfer music, who have a popular blog. But the other two? One guess why they’re there.

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A Christian couple got into a discussion with a Muslim woman about the status of Jesus and the life of Muhammed. Because the Muslim woman was offended, the couple now face criminal charges.

OK, now without cheating and watching the news story first, guess what country this happened in. Saudi Arabia? Iran? Pakistan? No, no, and no. Now watch the clip.

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Christian apologists (and Christians in general) have noted from time to time that there is an important difference between being able to know that God is real and being able to show that God is real. You can do the former without doing the latter.

Christians have sometimes spoken about our ability to know that God is real in terms of the “inner witness” of the Holy Spirit, whereby God directly gives believers an assurance of God’s closeness to them. If any believer has this assurance, then s/he will have a confidence in God that is independent of her ability to construct an argument to satisfy another person that he belief in God is well founded. William Lane Craig, for example, often notes in his debates about the existence of God that numerous people claim to know God in this way because of the “inner witness” of the Spirit. Approaching the same claim from a different angle, Alvin Plantinga has carefully developed the claim that belief in God can (provided it is true) be properly basic, in this case grounded in claims that a person is not able to truthfully deny, formed by the right type of experiences (it’s a little more qualified than that, but this will do for now).

The (as yet) unnamed author of the “Thoughts of the Foetus” blog doesn’t think that the inner witness, even if real, can grant the kind of confidence or comfort that believers say it can. here’s why:

I would just like to point out that it is not nearly as comforting as Bill Craig seems to think. For example, in a popular youtube video circulating starring Bill, he claims this “inner witness” offers peace to a doubting Christian, because it grounds the certainty of his faith in something wholey apart from complicated philosophical arguments. But this simply isn’t true, because the “holy spirit epistemology” itself is a philosophical thesis that must be somehow rationally defended. If this were not so, then why does Craig devote nearly a whole chaper in “Reasonable Faith” and an entire “Reasonable Faith” podcast to doing just this?

The writer finished of that blog entry saying “Anyone want to defend Craig here?” I posted a reply at that blog earlier today but it hasn’t appeared yet. I’m sure it will, but I wanted to share it with readers here as well. It went like this:

Your objection is that the “inner witness” is no comfort because, in order to defend the claim that there exists an inner witness to another person, ‘the “holy spirit epistemology” itself is a philosophical thesis that must be somehow rationally defended.’

You need to explain why you use the word “must.” It must be rationally defended in order for… for what? The possibility of an experience need not be defended before the experience can be had, obviously (e.g. I don’t need to defend the scientific thesis that my eyes provide reliable information about the outside world before I can have confidence in what i see). So you need to mean that before I can have confidence in the certainty provided by the inner witness, I must be able to rationally defend to another person the claim that the inner witness is possible, or that basic beliefs can be formed in this way.

But this is clearly a false assessment. If – as a matter of fact – basic beliefs about God can be formed in the way that Plantinga suggests, or God can be experienced in the way that Christians maintain, then this phenomenon itself provides confidence. Why would that confidence only apply to people with enough philosophical nous to explain the epistemological implications?

Certainly, the thesis that such an internal witness can exist needs to be defended if one wishes to persuade philosophical skeptics that it exists. But in order to *have* the confidence Craig speaks of there is certainly no need to formulate such a defense.

Before anyone needs to defend Craig, I think you’d need to first build up a robust, plausible argument for the requirement that you claim exists.

Glenn Peoples

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I’ve spent a good chunk of Saturday night cleaning up bad code. When I built the Beretta site I knew a little about web design, but I still managed to leave a lot of ugly code lying around. I know a little more now than I did then, so tonight I went through the pages and did some tidying. You might not notice any difference visually, but believe me it’s way better.

I also re-vamped my CV to look all pretty earlier today.

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