BIBLE ENRICHED SPIRITUAL TRUTHS: March 2022

Thursday, 31 March 2022

Christian Witness After War: A Firsthand Assessment of Armenia and Azerbaijan

After churches change hands in Nagorno-Karabakh, can Armenian and Azeri Christians reconcile faster than their governments?

Ibrahim Baghirov died as an infant. His mother, Mary, had read in the Gospels about Jesus and Lazarus, so she prayed for God to raise her child from the dead. He did, she says. Doctors in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, confirmed the miracle to her, which also confirmed her fledgling faith as a Muslim-background Christian.

Two decades later, Baghirov is an emerging preacher in the church that meets in the family’s home.

But in September 2020, as Azerbaijan launched what would become a 44-day war against neighboring Armenia, Mary’s faith faltered. Having once trusted God where medicine failed, she hastily made her son an appointment for an unnecessary surgery in hopes of keeping him from conscription. He gently rebuked her.

“I will go wherever God takes me,” said Baghirov, now 26 years old. “There are ways to keep me here, but there will be no blessing in that.”

He deployed within weeks to the front lines in the snowcapped peaks of Nagorno-Karabakh, a swath of land about the size of Delaware that is encircled by present-day Azerbaijan and has been contested for centuries.

Along the way, Baghirov said he received a word from God: None of his fellow soldiers would die, and he would be their minister. His country is predominantly Muslim, and several of his comrades shunned him after his pocket New Testament fell from his backpack. Others asked questions, though, and became friends.

Azerbaijan, with a reputation as one of the most secular countries in the Muslim world, is tolerant of its long-established Christian minority community. But its long-standing animosities toward Christian Armenia are a different story.

The two countries’ generations-old dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh—a majority-Armenian ...

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Orgies, Cocaine and the Dangers of Boring Sins

The temptations of the flesh don't have to be dramatic to be detrimental.

“No one’s ever invited me to a cocaine party or an orgy, and I’ve been working in Washington for years.”

I never thought I’d say those words, but I did recently when a younger Christian asked me, in hushed tones, whether it’s true that members of Congress are snorting cocaine and organizing sex parties. I stared back blankly, wondering if this man knew that Congress resembles more a senior adult bingo night than a fraternity house.

I quipped that I’ve never heard of much of that going on but that maybe I just wasn’t invited— people aren’t likely to invite a Baptist preacher if they want to put together a coke-fueled bacchanal.

This week U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) described people he once respected inviting him to do such things, speaking of the series House of Cards as an accurate depiction of life in Congress—controversial allegations that were swiftly refuted by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and others.

Personally, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone who works in government describe the situation in such terms. However, I know that many people—namely, Christians—assume that any place with a lot of non-Christians who have a whole lot of power will be like that.

One reason for this, I think, is that we often don’t understand just how boring the path to sin usually is.

The Bible speaks nowhere directly of cocaine, but it does address orgies in several places. The apostle Paul warns the church at Rome to walk away from “carousing and drunkenness, … sexual immorality and debauchery,” following up with the same warning about “dissension and jealousy” (Rom. 13:13). Both, ...

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Inside a Ukrainian Baptist Church at War

Christians in Lviv work and pray for victory as they face their nation’s crisis head-on.

First they had to get a car.

As the threat of a Russian invasion grew on the horizon, some shrugged it off, thinking it unlikely. But Vika Aharkova, who ministered alongside her husband Vasyl among the 20,000 international students in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, “kind of knew it was going to happen,” she said.

It’s easy to delay when crisis is coming. It’s easy to think of the many plausible reasons the worst won’t happen. They were still praying for peace. But they also knew they needed to be prepared.

They needed a car.

“If we know there is going to be a war, we need to buy a vehicle,” Vika said. “So we can evacuate fast.”

Vika and Vasyl appealed to supporters for funds to buy a car, and two days later, funds in hand, Vasyl traveled to Lviv, in western Ukraine, to purchase the vehicle. He immediately drove back to Kharkiv—a 14-hour journey.

The invasion started eight days later, at 5 a.m. on February 24. At 5:30, Vika and Vasyl were in the car, each carrying just a single backpack.

By the time they left the city, they had five more people, with five more backpacks: Vasyl’s sister, a couple from their church, an elder’s teenage daughter, and a student from the medical university.

No one took any extra luggage, but they did make room for a cat.

They would drive nonstop to Lviv—this time a 36-hour journey. Many people from all over the country have fled to Lviv now. In the West, near the Polish border, it’s more secure.

Here many churches, and many evangelicals like the Aharkovs, have turned to face the crisis head-on.

Step onto the grounds of the Central Baptist Church, for example, and the place is abuzz. Parked in front is a bus that will take ...

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Azerbaijan Adds Fuel to Armenian Concerns in Karabakh

With Russian peacekeepers distracted by war, Armenian activists, clergy, and officials debate how best to secure ancient churches and human rights in Artsakh.

Suffering freezing temperatures during the long winter cold in the Caucasus Mountains, this month Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh had no heating for three weeks. The natural gas “malfunction,” stated Azerbaijan’s state-run energy distribution company, has now been repaired.

It is not often that pipeline maintenance draws international concern.

The European Union and Freedom House both called for quick resumption of the supply in order to avert a humanitarian crisis. Over 100,000 residents in the contested enclave rely on Armenian natural gas that passes through Azerbaijani territory.

Nagorno-Karabakh, which Armenians call Artsakh, lies within the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan. Armenians accused Azerbaijan of deliberate disruption, prevention of repair, and installation of a new valve with which they can shut off gas flow at will.

Secured by Armenians backed by Armenia’s military following the fall of the Soviet Union, Artsakh sought independence for three decades while controlling six buffer zones in depopulated Azerbaijani lands. Negotiations failed to resolve the dispute, until Azerbaijan launched a 44-day war in 2020 that recovered significant territory.

A Russian-brokered ceasefire ended active hostilities.

Yet skirmishes continue, and Azerbaijan accuses Armenia of instigation. Last November, Armenia stated an Azerbaijani incursion occupied 15 square miles of sovereign territory. Christianity Today was reporting from one of the liberated buffer territories at the time.

And in the month prior to the pipeline issue—with the world’s attention focused on Ukraine—Russia officially accused Azerbaijan of breaking the terms of the ceasefire. Monitors recorded at least four ...

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Wednesday, 30 March 2022

Christian Condemnations of LGBT Not Hate Speech in Finland, Court Rules

A politician who tweeted Romans 1:24-27 and a bishop who published a pamphlet win unanimous decision.

Helsinki district court judges have dismissed hate speech charges against a Finnish politician who tweeted out Bible verses and the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission who published a pamphlet on gender roles.

In a unanimous decision, the judges ruled on Wednesday that Päivi Räsänen, a parliamentarian who faced a potential sentence of 120 daily fines, said things that were “partly offensive, but not hate speech.”

In a related decision, Bishop Juhana Pohjola, who faced a potential 60 daily fines, was found “not culpable” for the publication of Räsänen’s 23-page booklet, Male and Female He Created Them.

The ruling is being hailed as a victory for free speech and freedom of religion by Räsänen and her supporters.

“I greatly appreciate that the court recognized in its ruling the importance of free speech. I hope that this ruling will help prevent others from having to go through the same ordeal,” she said. “This has been my honor.”

The judges found that the purpose of Räsänen’s writing was not to insult or harm LGBT people but to defend what she believed to be the biblical concepts of family and marriage. In its decision, the court said that Räsänen’s comments included both value judgments and factual statements that might be considered offensive, but the statements did not amount to “incitement to hatred,” and should thus be considered legal.

Significantly, the court also stated in its decision that it is not its job to interpret biblical concepts. Under Finnish law, the judges said, they are not able to determine whether a particular interpretation of a scriptural passage is correct.

Though both ...

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Defining ‘Woman’ Starts with Humanity, Not Femaleness

The debate about the “second sex” brings us back to biology, humility, and Genesis 1.

Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson made waves last week with her refusal to provide a definition for the word woman. Responding to Senator Marsha Blackburn, Jackson sidestepped the question, stating, “I’m not a biologist.” Senator Ted Cruz returned to the line of inquiry by asking who Jackson would include in a gender-based discrimination lawsuit. Jackson again deferred, citing the fact that such cases are currently making their way through the lower courts.

Conservatives quickly memed Jackson, portraying her refusal to answer the question as clear indication of progressive nonsense. After all, anyone should be able to define what a woman is. The only problem with this, of course, is that we’ve struggled to define what a woman is for thousands of years.

Whether it was the ancient Greeks who saw woman as a “mutilated male” or church fathers who did not believe women were made in the image of God as men were, the record of history shows people not quite knowing what to make of women. Even within our own country’s past, women have struggled to gain those “inalienable rights” that are ostensibly the birthright of every human being and “endowed by their Creator.”

In her 1947 essay “The Human-Not-Quite-Human,” Christian apologist and scholar Dorothy Sayers reflects on the inadequacy of our working definitions of woman:

The first task, when undertaking the study of any phenomenon, is to observe its most obvious feature. … It is here that most students of the “Woman Question” have failed, and the Church more lamentably than most, and with less excuse. … No matter what arguments are used, the discussion is vitiated from ...

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Why I’ve Gone Soft on Welfare

Can we truly do mercy ministry if we lack compassion?

In one of my final classes at seminary, I was—as usual—the only libertarian. We were talking poverty and social welfare, and I found myself rushing to explain mine wasn’t the dismissive attitude some classmates expected libertarianism to entail, nor was it born of ignorance of the needs at hand.

If I had that same conversation today, it wouldn’t play out quite the same way. In some ways, nothing would be different: None of the principles that then informed my position have changed. But subsequent years have reshaped my assumptions about how Americans would handle poverty if left to do it voluntarily.

Of course, many Christians, churches, and ministries would be eager to help, but I’ve become skeptical that our national voluntarism would adequately rise as welfare receded, more pessimistic about whether a nation in which most profess Christianity would act like Christ if given this chance, more convinced of our selfishness and oblivion toward the common good. I’ve gone soft on welfare.

Let me begin by saying what isn’t altered in my thinking. First is my understanding of what Scripture says on poverty. There are few simpler exegetical tasks than demonstrating that God cares for the poor and expects his people to do likewise until the redemption of creation is complete.

Israel was commanded to be generous to the poor (Deut. 15:10–11); Job cites sympathy for the poor as proof of righteousness (30:25); the Psalms praise God as a defender of the poor (e.g., 12:5; 14:6). “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker,” says Proverbs 14:31, “but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” The prophets condemn “grinding the faces of the poor,” ...

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Why We Need the Evangelical Jeremiad

Speaking about dangers and errors is no failure of love for one’s own community.

Amid the meltdown within evangelical Christianity, some are warning against the dangers of the jeremiad. A few of these critiques are prompted by books like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, which argues that evangelicalism’s problems are deeper than we think. Usually, though, the jeremiads against jeremiads are directed toward those who are doctrinally fully within the conservative evangelical camp and are warning that something is awfully awry.

It’s confusing to see these anti-jeremiad arguments coming from people who have endorsed jeremiads about the cheap grace of evangelical conversionism contradicting “the gospel according to Jesus” or how evangelical flirtations with relativism and pragmatism would leave “no place for truth.” These older jeremiads were timely and necessary, even if one didn’t agree with every point. But they were certainly jeremiads.

It’s also baffling to be told that speaking about dangers and errors is a failure of love for one’s fellow evangelicals. Years ago I might have expected such a line from the folks who repeat, “Doctrine divides and love unites” and who look for ways to “affirm” everything. But those worried now about jeremiads are not Episcopalians but Puritans—the very ones who have insisted, rightly, that truth matters and who have worked to shore up doctrinal clarity even on issues where evangelicals disagree (such as predestination or women in ministry).

Likewise, the people issuing anti-jeremiad jeremiads continue to denounce dangers and errors in the outside culture. They want jeremiads against the abortion culture or sexual anarchy or New Atheism or gender ideology. Oddly, most of those ...

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