Wyatt Graham

Faith | Books | Culture

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. 

[Read more…] about A Taxonomy for Civil Obedience And Disobedience

What Are Gospel Issues?

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People sometimes call something a Gospel issue. Such statements seem to mean that the Gospel implies or perhaps requires adherence to some activity or belief. Probably the most common claim is that social justice is a Gospel issue. 

I know these discussions have a lot of depth to them. So here I do not want to directly engage them but work to define the phrase Gospel issue. In my view, some debates around this slogan become mired in confusion because two sides privilege different senses of the words Gospel and issue.  [Read more…] about What Are Gospel Issues?

If we are not a city of light that shines a light on the darkness, then what are we?

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Just hours away from me in Montreal exists the largest distributor of pornographic content in the world, serving billions of views a year to the world.
 
Added to that, the demand that Mindgeek/Pornhub creates contributes to the burgeoning trafficking industry that exists in our Canadian cities and is supported at times by Christians.

[Read more…] about If we are not a city of light that shines a light on the darkness, then what are we?

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