Wyatt Graham

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Theology

The Essential Church

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In Ontario (where I live), the government has mandated stay-at-home orders except for essential services. Churches may still meet under these guidelines but with only ten people.
 
In response, at least one church has decided to host many services of ten people; others have decided to go online; still others have decided to remain open despite the mandate. And I suppose some churches will continue to do host multiple services in the week as they had done even before the pandemic.
 
In this sense, Christians have shown in various ways that they believe the church is vital. Some use the language essential to (I think) indicate that churches should remain open like other essential services (e.g., a grocery store). In Ontario, we still can meet with ten people. But these recent restrictions do limit our freedom to worship.  
 
Here, I want to use the language of essential to argue for a particular way to describe the church’s relationship to the world: namely, how the church is to the world as the soul is to the body. 

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Does Hebrews 10:24-25 Command the Whole Church to Gather on Sunday?

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Hebrews exhorts the letter’s recipients to not neglect meeting together “as is the habit of some” (Heb 10:25). Many apply this verse to churches such that it becomes a command to meet together as the whole church on Sunday mornings. 

Everyone agrees that this passage exhorts the audience of Hebrews to not neglect (or forsake) meeting as some others had done. The question I am asking is: does it command the church universal to meet on Sunday morning as a whole gathered body? And if it does, then would that command be at odds with submitting to governmental mandates that temporarily restrict or prevent regular Sunday morning worship? 

Here are my thoughts. [Read more…] about Does Hebrews 10:24-25 Command the Whole Church to Gather on Sunday?

A Taxonomy for Civil Obedience And Disobedience

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When it comes to the question of when we should or should not obey civil authorities, our default must be obedience (Rom 13:1). That said, we live in a complex world in which we also must not do evil. To make sense of this complexity, I propose that we use these four distinctions to guide our moral reasoning for when we should follow the default of obedience and when we might need to disobey an evil requirement. 

  1. Obeying civil authorities is good.
  2. Civil authorities can require good, or neutral actions. We should obey.
  3. Civil authorities can themselves do evil structurally, which we should lobby against. 
  4. Civil authorities can require us to do evil, which we should resist. 

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Every Morally Evil Thing Points to Its (Proximate) Cause, Which Is Us

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In a prior article, I argued that every Christian should be committed to a view of reality in which every good thing points to its Cause, which is God. Here, I want to argue the converse. Every Christian should be committed to a view of reality in which every morally evil thing points to its (proximate) cause, which is us. (We can cause moral evil only because God as prior Cause ensures our creaturely freedom).

The argument here should be a given. For some, it is not because of a particular view of God’s sovereignty that seems to require that God somehow directly causes moral evil. But God is good. Is it good to carry out moral evil, or is it good to require agents to do moral evil? I answer no, as would almost anyone (I hope). I will explain what I mean more fully below, but I believe we should see moral agents as being responsible for their moral evil because they willed to do evil. 

To make this argument, I first need to make some necessary distinctions about what I mean by evil since I am specifically talking about a certain kind of evil, namely, moral evil.  [Read more…] about Every Morally Evil Thing Points to Its (Proximate) Cause, Which Is Us

Thank God for the Gift of Life

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One of the deepest questions we can (and perhaps the oddest) is: why are conscious, here, and living? I know. Abstract, right? Kind of. But pretty much everyone wants to live with a purpose. We might think, I live to rebuild cars or I live to craft beautiful art. So what makes us feel like we have purpose; what makes us feel like we even think about purpose. 

I am not sure a dog can think about why he does what he does. He may love bones. But does he think, why do I love bones? Unlikely. Humans alone think about why. We all seem to want to know our purpose, want to know why we are here. And so it is not such a stretch to ask: why are we conscious at all—why can we even think about “why”?

The answer involves our relationship to God.  [Read more…] about Thank God for the Gift of Life