Do you love me more than these?

Jesus asks Peter, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?” (John 21:15). The “more than these” is a sticky question we must all answer if we want to follow Christ. It took Peter, the one who bragged that he would not be like the others and deny Christ, denying Him three times in one night before he would realize that he loved self-preservation more than he loved Jesus. 

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More real that the ground I’m standing on

I’ve talked a lot about God and science and faith, so I thought I would briefly talk about what faith means to me. One line in a song says it all for me, “You’re more real than the ground I’m standing on.” This comes from a song by Jonathan David Helser titled, “Abba.” I’ve included a recent rendition of this song below. 

Kierkegaard: Reintroducing Christianity into Western Culture

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher in the early to mid-19th century. What’s interesting to me is that he predicted the cultural Christian problem we have even to this day and talked about how to reintroduce genuine Christianity back into the culture.

I’ve included a short video clip about Kierkegaard’s thoughts on this that I believe would be a good follow-up to my last post. Kierkegaard was basically saying the same thing over 150 years ago (only more brilliantly) that I was trying to say in my post, where I was contrasting Christendom with following Christ.

Christendom is dead…long live Christianity!

We can rightly say that Christendom, which has dominated Western culture for over 1,600 years, is dead. Long live Christianity! I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. After long exchanges with atheists here about what Christianity is or isn’t, I thought I needed to address this head on, because if we think Hitler was a Christian, we’ve definitely lost the plot! But before I get to that, I’m personally very glad about the death of Christendom because we can finally stop conflating what Christianity is with a cultural and geopolitical religion.

How He Loves

One of my all-time favorite worship songs is “How He Loves” by John Mark McMillan. By the way, I don’t like the sanitized version by David Crowder as much for reasons that will become apparent later.  I wrote about that here if you’re interested in knowing what I’m talking about.

What really resonates with me about this song is how beautifully raw and real it is. 

Two paths to finding meaning and purpose

Last time I shared what Nietzsche meant by saying that “God is dead.” I’m paraphrasing here, but he predicted (with uncanny accuracy) that when we, as a modern society, have “killed God” by losing faith in a True World view (afterlife, religion), we will inevitably slide into nihilism.  I would like to continue by comparing his solution to this dilemma to that of Christ’s.

The death of God, true worlds, and Christian hope

On April 8, 1966, Time Magazine’s cover read, “Is God Dead?” which created quite a stir, but this meme was made famous long before by atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. I have included a short video clip about this that I will borrow from to explain what he meant by saying this and to make my own point.

Nietzsche announces the death of God in a famous aphorism in his book, The Gay Science called “The Madman.”