Andy Rau over at ThinkChristian, a smart blog hosted by Gospelcom.net, has a fun post with a serious intention on the Amazing Randi’s evisceration of con artist Peter Popoff.

James Randi has also taunted so-called psychics Sylvia Browne and Allison Dubois (the inspiration for the TV show Medium), and has a standing offer of a million dollars to anyone who can “show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” (Does the success of Deal or No Deal count?)

To follow up on Andy’s question to his readers: Is it possible to challenge Randi on the supernatural? I guess it would depend what “proper observing conditions” means. And how easy would it be for Randi et al. to dismiss such events as “coincidences” or “natural phenomena” simply because they are observed as occurring within the natural realm?

In any event, I think a challenge, something on the order of Elijah vs. the priests of Baal, in which a righteous man of great faith calls down an unmistakable sign of God’s power to shock and awe idolators, would be an act of impiety in light of the Cross. Yes, the Resurrection was an event in history—but Scripture says that the Risen Christ appeared only to believers. It was the Cross that was visible to scoffers. But in the Cross, as Luther repeatedly reminds us, God is hidden in the suffering of Jesus.

The only thing that will convict an atheist or skeptic of the truth of Christianity is the transforming power of the gospel itself. The real challenge is to present the Cross to the unbeliever, again and again and again. You may not win a million dollars under Randi’s terms, but you may be a witness to a regenerated life—the only miracle that matters in the end.

P.S. Randi also writes for Skeptic magazine, edited by Michael Schermer, an ex-evangelical and one of the more reasonable and temperate of the New Atheists (although he hates such labels).

This week’s New York Times Book Review is “The Islam Issue.” Some of the articles are worth checking out.

This article on Mormonism in the New York Times Magazine is certainly worth reading.

. . . of the Southern Baptist Convention. (Sorry—should I have put that in the headline?)

Moderates (presumably those of an Arminian bent) will not be pleased. Mohler is one of a growing number of conservatives within the SBC seeking to bring Baptists back to their Calvinist roots.

It was only a year ago that Mohler was on the brink of death with serious pulmonary issues. Needless to say, he got better. When Time magazine interviewed him shortly after his recovery, the conversation turned quickly to matters theological, and Mohler was asked how he could be so certain he was one of the elect. He replied:

We are supposed to look for the signs in our lives, of regeneration and authentic faith, but we should not live in continual fear that we are somehow not assured of our salvation, because that too is a form of doubting God.

I couldn’t help but think of Calvin here. See Book Three, Chapter II, ¶16 (yes—The Institutes. Grab your copy, which I’m sure you all have handy):

Briefly, he alone is truly a believer who, convinced by a firm conviction that God is a kindly and well-disposed Father toward him, promises himself all things on the basis of his generosity; who, relying upon the promises of divine benevolence toward him, lays hold on an undoubted expectation of salvation.

But surely there are those who are not elect but who nevertheless have faith and are convinced that they too are saved. Of these, Calvin wrote (same chapter, ¶11):

[T]his does not at all hinder that lower working of the Spirit from taking its course even in the reprobate. . . . Besides this, the reprobate never receive anything but a confused awareness of grace, so that they grasp a shadow rather than a firm body of it. For the Spirit, strictly speaking, seals forgiveness of sins in the elect alone, so that they apply it by special faith to their own use. Yet the reprobate are justly said to believe that God is merciful toward them, for they receive the gift of reconciliation, although confusedly and not distinctly enough. . . . For nothing prevents God from illumining some with a momentary awareness of his grace, which afterward vanishes (italics mine).

Calvin had to come to terms with those clear passages in Scripture where people are said to have had faith and lost it, to have apostasized (think Hebrews 6). And so he concocts a trickster God who deliberately confounds people into thinking they’re one of the elect only to pull the rug out from under them, given that he brought them into the world solely to damn them forever in the first place. Nice.

Think about that for a minute. Husband and wife have a child, whom they feed, nurture, clothe, and worry over—completely unaware that God Almighty has a completely different agenda for that child. Calvin’s God has brought that child—nor more or less a partaker of original sin than Calvin himself—into the world solely to establish the historical locus for depriving him or her of faith, thus creating the rationale for sending that same child to hell for an agonizing eternity.

Yeah, that preaches.

Seriously: It does preach. Some of the most popular, influential, and “successful” preachers/teachers in post-Reformation church history have believed something very much like Calvin’s double predestination (think Spurgeon and Edwards). It’s also resurgent. In fact, there was a time in my life when the God who so loved the world but hated most of the people in it made a kind of sad sense. Given the miserable circumstances under which most people eke out their meager existence, God obviously must bless and curse in a manner that, to our minds, can only seem arbitrary and cruel. But I kept coming back to the full witness of Scripture read through the magnifiying glass of the Cross: the sovereign God we worship also “emptied himself,” took on feeble human flesh, and allowed sinners to handle, humiliate, and hang him on a tree. This does not look like a god who needs to damn people from before the creation of the world in order to exercise his sovereignty. In which case, our salvation would not be in Christ but in sheer luck, a roll of the prelapsarian dice.

And here I thought Calvinists frowned on gambling . . .