Mike Wittmer

Category: Christian Worldview

  • presuppositional follow-up

    My new friend got back to me a few days later.  He said that his presupposition was that he knew very little and was likely wrong about many things.  And he suggested that my view was immoral for not caring enough to offer proof for itself when heaven and hell were at stake.  I think…

  • presuppositional apologetics

    About a month ago I received a spirited email from a self-described skeptic whose friend had recommended that he read Don’t Stop Believing.  The reader said that he had been raised in a conservative Christian home, but now he thought that there was insufficient proof for the existence of God and Scripture.  He was singularly…

  • marketing repentance

    I’m sure that you have seen the new Tiger Woods’ television ad for Nike.  The 30-second spot features Tiger staring into the camera as the voice of his late father Earl says: “Tiger, I am more prone to being inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find…

  • render unto Ceasar (as little as possible)

    I did my taxes this weekend, and once again I was reminded of the significant perks which our government gives ordained ministers.  If the government is serious about closing loopholes it should probably look at the breaks it gives us.  Housing allowance saves me a lot of money each year, and I could save bushels…

  • Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, Question 2

    How should the Bible be understood? Martin Luther warned us not to destroy something good simply because it is abused.  He said that some people worship the sun and moon, but we don’t “pull the sun and stars from the skies;” some people visit prostitutes, but we don’t “kill all the women;” and some people…

  • your brain on google

    Last night I watched the first 30 minutes of the Frontline episode, “Digital Nation,” in which MIT and Stanford professors discussed the deleterious effects which the Internet and virtual reality have on their students’ ability to think (if you don’t know the meaning of the big word in that last sentence, maybe you’ve been spending…

  • say what you need to say

    Last Wednesday, and for the ensuing Wednesdays in January and February, I have the privilege of leading a class on “Engaging God’s World” at Calvary Baptist Church in Grand Rapids. I was a member of Calvary until we moved to the north side in 2003, and it’s where I preached a series of messages on…

  • projecting their projection

    Christmas break is a good time to catch up on my reading, and I just skimmed an older book by Paul Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (1999).  Vitz’s book is a response to Feuerbach and Freud’s assertion that God is a projection of our human desires.  Vitz observes that 1) they…

  • newsworthy

    60 Minutes ran an informative piece last night on the patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Istanbul.  The gist of the segment explained how Muslim Turkey is attempting to eliminate the 1700 year old church there.  It includes some stunning footage of early churches cut into the Tolkienesque mountains of Cappadocia, and is worth a…

  • the Jesus-driven life

    The lesson that I relearned from reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics II/1 and IV/1 this semester is that we need to start with Jesus, because if we don’t then he might not fit. A few weeks ago Rick Warren was on a special Thanksgiving edition of Meet the Press, and near the end of the…