My new book “Iceberg Ahead!” – an excerpt

I have been working on and off for the past few years on a new book. It is a real departure for me, working through how to face ministry disappointments, whether minor or major.

What happens when God’s servants face apathy, ingratitude, racism, psychological issues, physical ailments, lies, and other problems? Our solution is not to ignore our pain, but to “re-tell” our stories through the biblical lens, to ourselves, to others, to God.

We use the experiences of the apostle Paul on his missionary journey to Macedonia as the framework for understanding our own trials.

Enjoy! And I hope to see this in print before too long.

The disappointments in Christian ministry might feel like colliding with an iceberg!

TITLE:
Iceberg Ahead!
When God’s servants crash into cold, hard reality

Excerpt from the INTRODUCTION

Collision, the North Atlantic, 1912

Two massive objects took intersecting paths. And they nearly missed each other – this word ‘nearly’ is key, since it was a glancing blow alone that turned fatal for 1500 people.

RMS Titanic was the dream of Bruce Ismay of the White Star Line, which planned to astonish the world with the biggest ocean liner ever built. It was ready with only hours to spare: the boarding passengers remarked on the smell of fresh paint. From concept to maiden voyage took four long years, and finally it sailed forth under the command of Captain Edward Smith.

Meanwhile, traveling from the north: The berg was ages older than this or any human ship, calved from a Greenland glacier that had taken thousands of years to form out of layered ice and snow. The massive piece of ice had broken off the previous summer, and it took a year to drift in the direction of Nova Scotia, ambling toward its date with history. On April 14, 11:40pm, it would have been moving at less than half a mile per hour. Later reports noted that it was the only large berg in the vicinity, that is, in theory it could easily have been missed.

And traveling from the east: the Titanic plowed ahead with geometrical accuracy, as if it had planned its deadly rendezvous with the help of satellite positioning. If only the great ship had been traveling one knot faster or slower; if it had steamed from port a few minutes earlier or later; if it had turned a fraction of a degree further south when the iceberg warnings came in. If only we could factor in one of these minute changes, the Titanic would have sailed on to New York and the berg would have floated by in the darkness, unseen and unremarked. The name Titanic would be as historically obscure as the names of its two sister ships, the Britannic (sunk in World War I) and the Olympic (after many years of service, sold for scrap). There are no movies about the Olympic; no Celine Dion songs about the Britannic!

A hundred vain ‘what-ifs’ – and we have had a century to wonder why this disaster came to this ship on that night.

Collision, Paul on his first Macedonian Tour

It was at roughly the midpoint of his ministry years when the apostle Paul launched a new operation, with what seemed like specific direction from God: Go to Macedonia, announce the good news of Jesus.

As it turned out, Paul ran into massive opposition there. To extend the Titanic image even further, Paul rammed into one iceberg, but did not sink; he then limped along and smashed into a second one; and again, and again, for a total of, by our count, eleven distinct collisions, any one of which could have finished him off. (more…)

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Published in: on July 19, 2018 at 2:45 pm  Comments (3)  
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Book Review: Lisa J. Radcliff, Hidden with Christ – Breaking Free from the Grip of your Past

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Ideally, a young girl should grow up surrounded by love; the adults in her life should be dependable; they should respect boundaries; they should alleviate fear rather than stir it up. We instinctively feel that all of these shoulds ought to be a given. But the sad reality is that a large percentage of girls, and boys, are sexually abused.

It has been repeated so often that it has achieved the status of a mantra: Most molesters are people known to the child, be they relatives, family friends, teachers, community leaders, and even religious leaders.

And to multiply the evil, many in society and church have chosen the path of least resistance, going on the presumption that adults are more believable than children; that men are more believable than women; that abuse is caused more by the victims’ behavior or dress than the choices of the perpetrators.

Lisa Radcliff has lived this whole narrative (more…)

Published in: on March 8, 2018 at 5:37 pm  Comments (1)  
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No commentary necessary

Here is a snapshot of one and the same website, once in early September, once in early October.

BEFORE

Early September 2017. It has run this prediction since 2016.

AND AFTER

Two weeks after Sept 20, 2017, the very same page, very same site.

STILL LATER – it still looks the same! “Currently offline!”

These are not Photoshopped, by the way, except to blur out the website address. Which was a very gracious act on my part.

By the way, this was not his first rapture prediction. He did the same thing in 2011, 2015, and 2016, at least – perhaps there are more!

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This just in, March 2018: This same prophecy buff – who rails against me and others who have pointed out his repeated errors – has set a date. For the fifth time.

September 25, 2023

Got that?

Visit here: Did Your Pastor/Teacher/Expert/YouTube Guru Set a Wrong Date for the Second Coming? Don’t Let Them off the Hook!

“No commentary necessary!” by Gary S. Shogren, PhD in New Testament, Seminario ESEPA, San Jose, Costa Rica

Published in: on October 9, 2017 at 5:15 pm  Comments (1)  
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Want to set a date for the rapture and maybe take home a prize? Step right up, son, three shots for a quarter!

 

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“Any red-blooded man want to hit the Rapture on the nose? And maybe win a Teddy bear for the little lady!”

Autumn [2017] swings around, and with it this year’s harvest of Rapture Predictions. This year it’s September 23 (tomorrow!). And yes, I have looked over the “proofs”; given the late date, they are not worth the time it would take to overturn them.

Each Rapture Prediction typically begins with a bang and ends with a whimper. The author spends a year or two selling a ton of books and merchandise; the date comes and goes; and the “prophet” trails off in a mumble. And a shopping bag full of cash.

My advice is psychological and spiritual, and I will take a bit of liberty with Martin Luther’s dictum to “Sin boldly”:

If you plan to commit the SIN of setting dates (and I choose the verb “sin” with care), then

SIN BOLDLY.
BE DOGMATIC.
BET ALL YOUR CHIPS.
ALL IN OR ALL OUT.
WIN BIG OR LOSE BIG.

Only by sinning boldly, and in the aftermath owning up to your wickedness, will you set yourself up to repent of that sin. To put Luther in his proper context, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.”

But let’s not have this shilly-shallying, which blurs the issue of sin and accountability, and later allows you to slip the leash of repentance.

This time I’ll quote Shakespeare, also sort of out of context!

That you…never shall,
With arms encumber’d thus, or this headshake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As ‘Well, well, we know,’ or ‘We could, an if we would,’
Or ‘If we list to speak,’ or ‘There be, an if they might,’
Or such ambiguous giving out…this not to do…
Hamlet, Act I Scene 5

“Such ambiguous giving out”: that’s the twilight sin that leads to failed redemption. Shakespeare might say, Don’t hem and haw and say, “Well, maybe, we can’t set dates, but here is my prediction anyway, I know more than I can let on, people in high places tell me important things that I cannot share, NASA scientists are worried even though they deny it,” and so on.

Sin boldly – then, for the sake of your soul, repent just as decisively.

PS – As it turns out: David Meade, the man who predicted that the world would end on Sept 23, 2017, announced to the Washington Post on September 21st that he had changed his mind! Or had been misunderstood by that multipurpose scapegoat of the embarrassed Christian, the Lamestream Media! Meade now says: “The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending…A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October.” Things will be different in October?! Well, you don’t need to be a prophet to make such a supremely vague prophecy! Notably absent was any trace of remorse or repentance. [It’s Nov 30, 2017. Nothing is that different!]

Other Posts:

How to Calculate when Jesus will Come – without even being a prophet!;”

Let’s Put a Warning Label on False Prophets!“;

Did your pastor/teacher/expert/YouTube guru set a wrong date for the Second Coming? Don’t let them off the hook;

Another Astounding Prophecy to Toss in to the Trash Can

“Want to set date for the rapture, and maybe take home a prize? Step right up, son, three shots for a quarter!” by Gary S. Shogren, PhD in New Testament, Seminario ESEPA, San Jose, Costa Rica

Published in: on September 22, 2017 at 8:46 am  Leave a Comment  
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One of my “Other Ministries” in Costa Rica

Let’s label this ministry as: “Hi homeless friend! Would you like some breakfast?”

On Saturday, I go to the grocer and buy a kilo of local farmer’s cheese, a couple of loaves of bread, and big bottles of iced tea. Then I make up sandwiches for 25 or so people, gather paper cups, 2-3 New Testaments in a simplified version, maybe some second-hand clothes.

On the streets of San José, Sunday around 7am, I leave the car in a parking lot and head out with a jammed-full backpack. I take basic safety precautions, such as keeping all the people in my field of vision – but since I go out early, most of my contacts are still docile after their Saturday night. The street people migrate from one spot to another, so they aren’t necessarily where I last left them.

Then suddenly, there they are. It takes a second for the brain to register, That pile of rags is actually a man; that cardboard box is someone’s house.

Homeless man in San José, file photo

Wherever I see a cluster of people I stop and ask, Would you like some breakfast? I used to ask, “Are you hungry?”, but I switched my phrasing (more…)

Published in: on August 22, 2017 at 3:33 pm  Leave a Comment  
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“I (still) don’t believe it!” Thoughts on truth and social media, Part III

I have written elsewhere: “set aside videos of cute kittens or adolescents cracking up their skateboards. Let’s focus on those other things – political, social, religious, etc. – which get posted on social media and spread like wildfire!” I invite you to read the first two parts of this series before reading Part III:

“I don’t believe it!” Thoughts on Truth and Social Media – Part I

“I don’t believe it!” Thoughts on Truth and Social Media – Part II

Now I would like to update these with a Part III, with several other sources of doubtful “facts.”

ANONYMOUS INSIDERS

There is a whole genre of exposé literature that follows this formula: “I am an ex-[whatever] and I am going to reveal the shocking inside secrets.” Ex-Communist. Ex-Mormon. Ex-Satanist. Ex-Catholic priest (Charles Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, 1885).

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Fake news that has circulated as true since 1885!

Ex-Jesuit (Jack Chick’s man, “Alberto,” made a whole career with that claim). Ex-nun (Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed, 1836). Ex-physicist working for CERN. Ex-CIA operative. Ex-NASA scientist. Ex-Muslim. Ex-Freemason. In 2011 the internet was abuzz with “I was in the Illuminati: I’m Going to Tell you Everything, Shocking Expose.”

Of course, sometimes these revelations are legitimate: (more…)

Published in: on August 8, 2017 at 11:54 am  Comments (2)  
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Bible Prophecy, ch 1 – “Bible Prophecies” that are NOT found in the Bible

This is a long essay with numerous footnotes. The reader may prefer to download it in pdf form: Shogren_Bible Prophecy #1 Bible Prophecies that are NOT in the Bible

I plan on at least two more articles in this series, in which I will describe End-Time expectations that may or may not be found in the Bible, depending on your interpretation; and End-Time expectations that are in the Bible.

I grew up in the woods. By “woods”, I don’t mean a park with some scattered trees, but a place where large patches were so choked with brush and thorns and fallen branches and boulders from the last Ice Age that it was literally impossible to pass through. My mind returns to the woods every time I fight my way through the thicket created by our modern prophets. Because of their creativity, the predictions that people claim to be in the Bible outnumber, exponentially, the predictions that actually are in the Bible. That is why, before we can begin to talk about Bible prophecy, we have to clear the ground of heavy undergrowth, the things that people have been told are in the Bible, but which we cannot seem to find on any actual page of Scripture. I write this, not because I don’t love Bible prophecy, but because I respect it too much to see it taken lightly.

The very length of this article is the unfortunate side-effect of the tonnage of “prophecy myths” that are out there. One reason for this is that End-Time predictions are big business: take a look at the books by Tim LaHaye, Jack Van Impe, Jonathan Cahn, John Hagee, and even David Jeremiah. The Left Behind series of books alone has sold over 65 million, not to mention the movies and the merchandise. Irwin Baxter has no difficulty selling his very expensive DVD’s; and there are influential sites like Rapture Ready and End Times Prophecy News and Signs of the End and The Jeremiah Project and Terry James Prophecy Line or groups such as Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Many of them employ the same opening stratagem: “I have been studying and teaching Bible prophecy for X number of years; therefore, you should trust me to know what is in the Bible!”

In fact no: the Word of God tells us what to believe, and the believer has no need of a Prophecy Gatekeeper to access its pages.

Here we will focus on those who teach with the Bible in one hand, and today’s headlines in the other.[i] There are two problems with their method: first, it assumes that Bible prophecy must be being fulfilled in today’s news, as opposed to headlines from AD 582, 1007, 1851, or 2086; two, the prophecy experts have the unhappy tendency of starting with the news headlines, and then reading them back into the Bible. The 2016 Blizzard? Yes, someone discovered that it was an End-Times event, but only after the storm.[ii] Minor stock market crash in 2016? Same thing, and from the same source, the always-ready-to speculate Charisma News. While we would take to the streets in protest if some theologian placed his or her own tradition about the Bible, we don’t blink when the high priests of prophecy do basically the same thing with today’s headlines. We won’t even delve into the secular gurus such as David Ickes or Alex Jones or the Flat Earthers, who preach an apocalyptic viewpoint with very little Bible mixed in.

If some evangelicals (and yes, some Catholics,[iii] some Orthodox,[iv] some Adventists, plus the majority of the sects) are known for this sleight of hand, then the Jehovah’s Witnesses have to get the blue ribbon. Their modus operandi is to zero in on the Anxiety of the Day, knock on your door, mention how anxious people are about it, and then show how they, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, saw it all coming ahead of time! Exhibit A: this issue of Awake magazine from 1968: “Is it Later than you Think? Is time running out for this generation? What will the 1970’s bring?”

Take any headline from today’s paper, or Time magazine, or YouTube, or your newsfeed, or Facebook, and if you really, really try, I guarantee you’ll be able to find a Bible verse to show how it was predicted long ago. Syria in the news? Just look in the concordance and you will find a verse that fits.

Wow! All those 7’s, and just because Donald Trump sent a few small missiles into an empty airfield, one which the Syrians were able to quickly repair and start using again.

Another example: I just saw on CNN, “Promising Zika Vaccine Moves to Next Stage.”[v] And so let’s say I channel my Prophetic Ingenuity to put together an article like this:

“Revelation 16 says that there will be many plagues, which will kill a huge number of people. And what do we see in the news? People are coming down with Zika, and desperately trying to find a vaccine, instead of repenting from their sins.”

Now – remember that I did this “blindfolded,” without peeking, but let’s see if I can find someone doing this very thing (more…)

Published in: on April 27, 2017 at 1:23 pm  Comments (1)  
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Your Body, God’s Temple

The devil has a Weapon of Mass Destruction, and it is called online pornography. Of help is the following article is by Jason DeRouchie of Bethlehem Bible College and Seminary. It is one of the best explorations of the topics of masturbation and sexual fantasy that I have read, and I repost it, knowing I could not write one this good.

Blessings!

“If Your Right Hand Causes You to Sin,” by Jason DeRouchie

Published in: on December 5, 2016 at 9:15 am  Leave a Comment  
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Is the Earth a flat disc after all?

Is it just me, or is anyone else running into Flat Earth proponents lately? (Check this ARTICLE) People who think NASA is doing mind control over us, that no one has ever been to space, that the Bible teaches the earth is a disc? Yeah, it’s a thing. It’s conspiracy thinking at heart. Basically an extension of the chemtrail/anti-flouridation/man-never-landed-on-the-moon approach to truth and reality. Airlines supposedly fake their travel times, no-one has ever been to the South Pole, all of those outer space pictures were Photoshopped, all Aussies lie about how long their country is (see the map below to deduce why – in a FE model, it would have to be the size of Russia), time zones are a fake, and the stars are just points of light in an umbrella, fixed maybe a few hundred miles up.

01 Flat Earth Society Map (Charles K. Johnson).jpg

Like so

Just for one example, here is a meme I ran into this week, one which “proves absolutely” that the world is flat and the center of the cosmos, and that the stars whirl about us in unchanging position.

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One can disprove it, I think, with a 10th-grader’s knowledge of math and the stars.

To begin with, the first two figures are a smokescreen, since our daily rotation and our annual revolution around the sun would not be expected to alter the shape of constellations in any way. So these two are moot and can be put aside.

As for the third datum, the rate of speed is relevant, although it’s off by a factor of 10! It should be 45,000 mph, not 450,000 mph; this goof doesn’t fill me with confidence in the meme. In cosmic terms, by the way, 45,000 mph is a creeping pace, a little bit more than twice the speed of the space shuttle. The same shuttle that, at top speed, would need 165,000 years to reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

Anyway, the sun is moving at 45,000 mph in relation to an imaginary fixed point in space, but the meme fails to take into account that the other stars in our sector of the galaxy are all in motion through space as well, and more or less in the same direction. So it’s a bit like asking, “If that horse on the merry-go-round is really moving at 10 feet per second, then how come he doesn’t move further and further away from the other horses??? Therefore, the horse is not moving at all, and if NASA tells you otherwise, they’re lying!!”

"I full-out gallop, but the others keep right up with me! What gives??"

“I full-out gallop, but the others keep right up with me! Neigh! What gi-i-i-i=ves??”

Another point, is that in fact constellations do shape-shift over time, but it takes so long that they wouldn’t have seemed to move much in the few thousand years that people have been imagining patterns in them. HERE’s a good short article on the phenomenon, showing that stars have slightly changed their positions over the past couple of thousand years. That is why, thousands of years from now, the Big Dipper will look slightly less like a dipper.

Not that this evidence will change anyone’s mind. As with all such theories, you can cut off one head (or disprove one meme!) and a hundred others will grow up to replace it. That’s one reason why I’m not going to attempt to prove that the earth is really a sphere: I’m following my Golden Rule, “Cans of Worms shall not be Opened on This Blog.”

imagesToxicity warning: Flat Eartherism as such is a relatively harmless notion, but it does seem to come tangled up with anti-Semitism (the Zionists control NASA!), Nephilim mythology, Who Really Killed Diana theories, “Fold up a dollar bill and tell me you don’t see the Illuminati!” handcrafts, and other conspiracy thinking. As careful study has shown, “people who believe in one conspiracy are prone to believe others.” If we need proof, Alex Jones is Exhibit A. Conspiracy thinking is, as the earlier article notes, almost resembles a religion, with a fervor that rivals jihadism for its fury, single-mindedness, and closed thinking. In this case, NASA is the Flat Earther’s Antichrist, Galileo really was a heretic, and “Like the tobacco companies, NASA is now trying to target children with their lies!”

A conspiracy mindset is one of the reasons why so many conspiracy thinkers cannot seem to hold down a job or maintain a marriage.

Strange days indeed.

Recommended Link

IBRI has excellent studies on science and faith

Our friend Dr. Bob Newman has a fine article; the title gives it away, but he takes a gentle, pastoral approach to alternative science: Evangelicals and Crackpot Science

Related Posts

Christians and Myths

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics” has its 50th Anniversary

“Is the Earth a flat disc after all?” by Gary S. Shogren, PhD in New Testament Exegesis, Professor at Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica

Published in: on June 21, 2016 at 2:51 pm  Comments (5)  
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“I don’t believe it!” Thoughts on truth and social media, Part II

In Part I I began an extended-play rant against internet disinformation. I’m against it for two reasons: I don’t like false information; I don’t like to look foolish when I fall for it.

Here are other areas where we need to show some healthy skepticism:

ECHO CHAMBER EFFECT

In 2015 the social media were packed with people reporting that Pope Francis had announced that Islam and Christianity were equally valid and that the Koran and the Bible were basically the same message: “Jesus Christ, Jehovah, Allah. These are all names employed to describe an entity that is distinctly the same across the world.”

“I’m the pope, but I’m broadminded!”

People were outraged! The Vatican denied it which, for some of us, was evidence that it must have really happened. It appeared on the bogus Washingtonpost.com.co, conservativebyte.com, also civictribune.com (which altered the story, so that the pope supposedly said this at the White House). So, I have seen the same exact story, usually quoted verbatim, on four websites. Does this mean there are four “sources”? No, only one, and that original source (National Report again!) said they were just joking! But the echo effect means that the reader senses that, “It must be so, because everybody is talking about it!” The National Report was also responsible for the spoof that the Pope wants everyone to be micro-chipped by 2017.

I am not a Catholic, and once in a while people criticize me for overturning false rumors about the Pope. And every time, it takes me by surprise: after all, shouldn’t I stand up for truth, even if by debunking a lie it aids a group I don’t belong to? Shouldn’t I stand against lies about Republicans and lies about Democrats?

Here is a recent example: Paula White supposedly promised that if you pledged a certain amount of money to her work, then when you died she would raise you from the dead! Now, in my opinion, White is a scam artist and her teaching is a hot mess. And yes, she actually was trying to vacuum an additional $1144 dollars from each of her devotees. But when I looked it up, I found that she had promised that the money would clear out whatever was dead in each person, but not that she would physically raise them from the dead. Far be it from me to defend Paula White, whose message I find reprehensible on so, so many levels; but truth is truth, right?

On the flip side, I did pass along on social media that story that Joel Osteen had weaseled out from opening his church to Houston flood victims. It’s because, after chasing down the story, investing way more time than I should have, I concluded that the charge was accurate, and that among other things he had posted old photos to imply that his church had in the present been flooded, when it wasn’t. But let no-one say I passed along a rumor just because I don’t like Osteen! One hardly needs this particular flood anecdote to be able to repudiate his message! But truth is truth, right?

For the Christian there is a special sort of news source, the Prophetic Site. If one blogger says he, I don’t know, saw four grim horsemen riding around in the field ‘back of his farm, then the story will spread far and wide within days, if not hours.

TABLOIDS

Ah, for the days when tabloids were clearly labeled and placed at the supermarket checkout. Then you could give a quick glance and find out when Elvis was spotted with what Venusian or how a Wolf-Boy was loose in the Maine woods.

Here’s one you won’t soon forget:

wtf tabloid headline

Now you just have to click on and find tabloids online, for example, WorldNewsDailyReport.com. Read all about it! “Man who spend 57 Years Counting the Bricks in the Great Wall of China.”

Of course, (more…)

Published in: on January 30, 2016 at 5:27 pm  Comments (3)  
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