“Are you a worshiper of the Purple Unicorn?”
On Sunday Evening August 5th, 2007 about 200 people gathered at Murrieta Valley Church in Murrieta, California to hear a debate between Pastor Gene Cook, Jr and Steve Scianni on the question of “Is the Atheistic Worldview Superior to Christianity?”
Click here to be linked to “The Narrow Mind Aftermath” blog and listen to the MP3 of the debate.
This debate highlights the strengths of presuppositional apologetics.
And while on this subject, I wanted to highlight 3 points Steve Hays recently made in a post on Triablogue:
i) The Reformed position… is not that apostates were never sincere, or never really believed in Christian theology. The position… is that apostates were either closet unbelievers (in some cases) or unregenerate believers (in other cases).
ii) The Calvinist claim is not that they were insincere then, but, rather, that they were insincere now. It’s not their former belief which was necessarily insincere, but their subsequent disbelief. Deep down inside, they know there is a God, and they are in a state of rebellion.
iii) The distinction between true and nominal believers is not unique to Calvinism.
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Jason Robertson is a husband and a father and a pastor. He is dedicated to leading and equipping his the Church with God’s word and biblical theology for life ministry, using a combination of pastoral, church planting and evangelism experience. He holds a Master of Divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is experienced in church planting, evangelism, missions, and the training of pastors and Bible teachers.
Jason has been preaching the gospel since 1985, serving the first ten years of ministry as a Southern Baptist itinerant evangelist out of Milldale Baptist Church in Zachary, LA which ordained him in 1993. He has preached in hundreds of churches in over 30 States and 4 countries. He planted churches in Siberia, Russia in the summers of 1993 and 1994. He founded Murrieta Valley Church in California, which he planted in cooperation with the SBC NAMB in 2001. He also teaches ministry students at California Baptist University.
You can hear his sermons and read his manuscripts on sermonaudio.com. Just follow the link to "sermons" at the top of this page.
“Unregenerate believer” strikes me as an oxymoron.
Those beliefs which make someone a “believer” can only be believed if one is regenerate. You know, the whole “he who has ears to hear, let them hear” thing…one’s spiritual ears must be provided by the Holy Spirit to be able to believe.
If there’s any daylight between an “unregenerate believer” and the FV’s “non-elect believer” (a phrase used by both Wilkins and Wilson), I’m missing it.
Could you elucidate, please?
Thanks ever so!
Anne in Fort Worth
I enjoyed the debate. Personally, I felt for Steve who struggled with his doubts while reading the Scriptures. I know that some churches are not safe places for people to work through their doubts. I also know that some Christians like to present themselves as “never having doubted.”
I wonder if our young people would be better served if Christian leaders honestly could say, “Yeah, I struggled with that question too… And this one here… And that one there. But… Here’s what I’ve learned through an all out engagement with (not a stifling of) those doubts. And my faith is stronger for it.”
I know that doesn’t always “work.” But I believe the church and our young people would be better served by engaging the issues at hand.
This is why I enjoy Gene’s approach. I believe he tries to deal with people on that level.
Concerning the debate: Steve’s arguments served to reinforce my faith. I don’t think he saw that his atheism is based on moral outrage–a feeling.
If he wants to promote his atheism, he better get a grip on some Platonic form of it. He did not serve naturalism well.
Good debate. Good decorum from both participants.
JR
If I am not mistaken, isn’t it the INVISIBLE purple unicorn?
Of course, assuming it is invisible, how exactly does one know it is purple, and a unicorn, not a goat?
Fred
I saw that Purple Unicorn last night on CSI New York. It was on a tab of blotter acid. You know, LSD printed on a piece of paper. I think I saw the same unicorn in the 70′s, though at that time she was morphodite, a shapeshifter, or maybe I was just imagining things. If you know what I mean. And oh, by the way, at that time in my life I was an athiest, right before I became a Zen Buddist which was just before I became an occultist. Imagine that, signs signs everywhere are signs, found my mind in a brown paper bag, but then…. Everything was a purple haze, twentyfive, or six two four.
Whoops, flash-back!
This was an excellent debate. Atheisitc naturalism is no match for Presuppositional apologetics.