I enjoyed spending a good bit of the Lord’s Day listening to Dr. John Macarthur’s 2002 Mullin’s Lectures on Preaching at Southern Seminary. There is a rich treasure of great preaching and teaching at the SBTS on-line audio library page. It’s wonderful to hear the chapel speakers that now come to SBTS. Safe to say that during my day things were of a different flavor.

Judd: Great links. The statement from Knox seminary is heartening. May sales of Left Behind drop by 1% as a result and may someone burn the book in celebration. I’d like to make two comments about the “brights.”

One: I fully agree that Dennett is repackaging rationalism or naturalism, and the package is a not-so-subtle pejorative about the intelligence and honesty of “not-so-brights.” In other words, religious people are kinda dumb, pretending that something is there that ain’t. Freud said it much better. It probably will make a nice web site, but I can’t see Dennett selling too many t-shirts or having much of a convention. Brights are not quite as cheerfully inclined as he would like us to believe, and the reason, as some of the bloggers pointed out, is Dennett can’t successfully put a smiley face on the end of ethics. It’s not a cherry announcement that there is no longer any reason to assume right, wrong or significance. Read Ecclesiastes or a good suicide note to get more of the appropriate flavor.

Two: (Get ready for a shock) Life after death is the most difficult part of the Christian worldview for me to believe in. I do not struggle with the deity of Christ, the love of God or anything in the Gospel. But I can get downright morose about death, particularly the idea that we survive the finality of death and go to heaven. Part of my problem is the near-absence of this in the Old Testament. The other part is simply the finality of death, particularly the lack of tangible evidence that anyone survives death. (I’m a Houdini type. I’d love to hear a message from the other side, but I just can’t buy John Edwards, etc.) There is no point my personal faith is stretched more than acknowledging those parts of the Apostle’s Creed that take us beyond the grave. My own half-brother’s atheism frequently ridicules the idea of humans living “forever” as being a torturous and bizarrely unappealing notion. I understand what he’s saying.

Of course, there are two things I keep in mind. One is that our fallen nature is now particularly at war with the idea of life after death. Human nature is now blind and dead to this reality, and clings to this physical life with a tenacious idolatry. We cannot rightly think of God or of the life God intends. We must shrink it all to the human span. The other thing is that God’s plan is not for disembodied souls to float around in a spiritual state of eternal Vineyard worship services, but there is a new heaven and a new earth coming. A return to the original universe and the paradise of fellowship with God and real life in a real world. Resurrection. The rescue, remaking and renewal of creation. This is something most “brights” have never considered, and even most Christians miss what “eternal life” actually means in Bible. It is God taking all this death and making it into something entirely new and devoid of death. Sounds good to me.