Is it Israel or the Messiah?
Dear Elmi,
Congratulations on your graduation from UM-Dearborn! I'm proud of you but I also will miss you. Thanks for engaging me in so many deep and intelligent discussions over your 4 years here, most of which were about the Bible or the Qur'an. As you already know, this is part 2 of my exposition of the Servant in Isaiah 52 and 53. In part 1 I did a word-search overview of "Servant" in the entire book of Isaiah excluding chapter 52:13 - 53:12 to save it for later. So now, since I skipped that section before, I will focus only on the identity of the Servant in Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12. For convenience I have pasted the whole passage with my embedded comments below.
Your friend,
Scott
Everybody needs this coverage—even men.
by Sarah MacDonald—
Why are people so disrespectful? She didn’t understand why people couldn’t mind their own business and leave her alone. She was just trying to tend to her garden, and she didn’t need a bunch of people staring at her. People could be so self-centered. Just because she covered her head didn’t mean she was any less of a person. People would ask her why. Why? Why was her head covered? Submission! Tradition! They didn’t really care why, they were just judgmental, she thought. She would never act like they did. She was better than that.
Featuring: The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, by Steve Schlichter
The Locke and Lewis Lecture series is a video project conducted during finals week at UM-Dearborn (April 22-25). This year it consists of 36 "micro-lectures" on various topics related to the intersection of faith and reason. Watch the Introduction by Scott Cherry.
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that holding to both evolution and naturalism is self-defeating. You can have one or the other but not both. If evolution is the only input then we have no reason to trust in our ability to reason and no way to account for any interest in the truth content of any claim.
Just one of 36 micro-videos in the series. Click here for the full playlist.
A Story of Ethical Perfection
by Tom Gilson—
If asked, "Who's ethics were unmatched in all of Western literature?" who do you think of? ...Socrates? Buddha? There is perhaps only one character portrayed as possessing perfect power while being perfectly other-oriented. This is one of 38 micro-videos in the all-new 2nd annual Locke and Lewis Lecture Series. Thanks to Tom Gilson for filming this exceptional talk at our request.
Click here for Part 2 of Too Good to Be False by Tom Gilson
by Scott Oliphint—
Of all religions, Christianity is the one that has the most historical evidence, and therefore the least to hide, in what it purports. We should never hide from, or routinely dismiss, the historical aspect of Christianity. But if all we have are historical reasons for our belief in the resurrection, then it is possible to conclude, with a certain amount of probability, that the resurrection of Jesus Christ happened in history. However, we also recognize that, when we are thinking about the “why” question as it pertains to the resurrection of Christ, Christians should never be content to begin and end their belief in the resurrection of Christ with only historical data. Those data can support our belief in the resurrection. They can supplement what we believe and why we believe it. But historical data cannot be the center of our response to the “why” question. If the historical data are at the center, then the best we can say is that we believe the resurrection probably occurred. But that will not do; we do not believe in the probability of the resurrection. Instead, the center of our response to the “why” question of the resurrection is that, without the resurrection of Christ, there is, in fact, no Christianity at all.
Read the whole article here: https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/what-the-resurrection-means/