Matthew Burkholder

If you've ever taken any interest in the debate between Christianity and Atheism, you've more than likely come across the following critique of the Bible: "The Old Testament God is hardly one to be worshipped. He's a vindictive, angry, jealous God who commands genocide!" This line of attack is hardly unjustified. How are we to respond when we come across verses like these?  However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them - the Hitties, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusties - as the Lord your God has commanded you. (Deut 20:16-17) Go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. (1 Sam 15:3) For some, the solution is easy. Simply pretend like these verses don't belong in the Bible. Problem solved. But t...

Very rarely in years past did theology put down deep roots in my life. I guess it is because of my natural inclination to question and deconstruct ideas, and my love of playing devil's advocate. This has often gotten me into trouble with my wife, as I'll often take a position in a discussion that I don't even remotely believe, and before I realise it, I am debating her on points that I myself agree with! Sometimes I don't realise I am doing it - debating has always been a bit of a thrill for me. So why am I now trying to become a theologian? Theology, I have come to believe, must eventually come to a head. What is it stake is my avenue of faith - how I see God, the Church, others and most importantly myself. What we are pursuing are the big answers that shape our inner thoughts and guide our actions. These aren't the rudiments of math; I cannot prove what is theologically true - but like all of life's important truths theology finds itself in subjective con...

For the past couple years I have been struggling with the way in which the gospel (good news) is often presented. A book that helped me work through a lot of my theology was A More Christlike God  by Bradley Jersak. fire and brimstone gnashing words my heart limps on long before it had left it was already gone in the crimson break before the end, the final night's score fear perches, ready to take me once more to taunt and take me to places i know a fire's horrid answer the truth will i now know? memories carved will one day they crack? in the life after death this burden breaks my back my crime they say is as clear as the day of being born of living of the air i am stealing i once was a light i could see in a mirror before it arrived and darkened my cheer age has left its mark and robbed me of joy oh fire and brimstone is this who You are? oh fire and brimstone i guess i'll run far when i sought ancient cloth to relieve the pain in...

I don't know how to share this, I formally started this a long time ago, but in all reality, I think this has been something I've been working on my entire life. This is my story, and I hope my story can help you heal. My prayer is that the motion from grief to grief will be rooted in the narrative of hope. Humanities collective courage to face pain head on has flowed over into my own heart. Some of these stories will be new or old, but I hope you can see the narrative and find some comfort. Feel free to read this in the future, when the hurt is a little less raw - your need of healing is far more important to me than my own, I write this not for sympathy, but because I care deeply for you. A Child's Favourite Word I think you are a lot like me, sentimental with strong emotional impression of things that have happened to us in the past. My childhood was relatively beautiful. My parents loved me, raised me with some strong values, provided for me, and did their absol...

This question has surfaced during the discussion of what constitutes good Christian art. The gospel, which has survived since it was first proclaimed in the first century, has been communicated in a variety of form. In the oral form of the early church, to the musings of the Church Fathers, to visual art in an illiterate world, to being printed on a press; the gospel, in a living way, has transcended mere information and cemented itself as that which innervates human imagination. It survives not only because it exists as beautiful words written on a page, or as a theme of redemption painted on glass windows, or layered upon a moving melody, but because it is the Spirit at work in the hearts of sinful men. It is thus imperative that any synthesis of the gospel and art be done in a way which  respects that mystery. Every generation must wrestle with both the gospel and how to  communicate it as it is not something that can ever be figured out. In a society that lives in  ...

With the recent American presidential debate thrusting the abortion discussion into the centre stage, many people have taken refuge in their respective ethical camps. No two camps could be further divided. The battle between who holds the higher right, a mother or her unborn child, is understandably a passionate debate. My personal conviction regarding the ethics of abortion are extremely clear - an unborn child is a human, and no reasonable argument has ever been given to deny personhood to those who are self-evidently human. All "non-personhood" propositions are ad hoc arguments meant to justify the act of abortion. The environmental location of an unborn child or his/her relationship to the mother are moot points; what matters is whether an unborn child is a person. If an unborn child is a person, then it is vulnerable, without the capacity to choose and worthy of every protection by the state. I believe they are persons, and it is not a pleasant reality to live in a world...

Is logic in America dying? In 1998 a doctor by the name of Andrew Wakefield published an article in the medical journal The Lancet claiming to have found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The research, which had a sample size of twelve children was quickly disseminated and latched onto by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. In the wake of the article, the scientific method began its due process with independent and governmental researchers attempting to confirm Wakefield's claim and found it to be entirely fraudulent, leading the journal to retract the article's claims . However, the damage was done. Uninformed, albeit well-intentioned, parents began to stop vaccinating their children for MMR and the result has be devastating. Fuelled by celebrity authorities  and alternative medicine crusaders , the anti-vaccine movement has had a lasting impact on modern society all over the world. Simply put, where Wakefield's message has caught on, measles has followed. What...

For those interested in evangelical history, here is an essay I wrote on Jonathan Edwards: The Introspective Spirituality of Jonathan Edwards

One of the most poignant warning signs in history is the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. It also is unfortunately one of the easiest to ignore. Polluted by our own sense of divine like humanistic narcissism, societies far too often refuse to asses their own propensity to horror. Putting faith in human systems of checks and balances, we like to think that we are above the "evil" of "others", failing of course to remember that the madness of Germany happened in a democratic country. Hitler is suppose to be a mirror, to show us what each and every one of us are capable of becoming in a climate of fear and anger, and that no amount of modernism, progression or social evolution can ever hope to remove the potential for human beings to be evil. The greatest lie that has ever been told, and will continue to be told, is human progress. Systems of government and our judicial guardians can melt in the heat of social anger and unrest. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizen...

The deep polarization that is American culture seems to be drifting further apart with no hope of reconciliation. It never ceases to amaze me how after something as tragic as the Orlando massacre, people begin quickly pointing fingers at the other  and blame them in oversimplified terms. One can't help but wonder if the volume of these mass shootings in the United States has started to become so normal, they have become less a tragedy and more a vehicle for political persuasion.  I realize that as a Canadian I am an outsider, but it seems as though people are talking at each other and not with each other, and I think like most arguments that digress into such black and white thinking, it becomes  impossible to be rational. The internal vision of the American psyche is truly unique, but I hope they are asking the question: "Why is this an American problem?" I would hardly claim to be an expert on the subject of mass murderers, but I do feel as though I understand ...

Every Easter season we remember the greatest event in human history, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As we tell the story in our houses of worship, a story that has been told to us many times before, a story we remember every time we share in the Lord's Table, a story we sing about and express in our art, we declare our God is a God who suffered. It's an odd claim and truth to boast of and we understand why the early disciples struggled to accept it. The disciples of Jesus had grown up in a world with suffering all around them. They felt the oppression of a brutal empire. They saw profound sickness and death. They saw economic poverty as the result of the rich and spiritual poverty as the result of hypocrisy and empty religious leadership. The walked with Jesus and saw him heal lepers, calm storms, raise the dead, and transform the lives of the darkest sinners. What was the culmination of Christ's ministry and profound love for humanity? "And he began ...

Response 1: "I'm not sleeping again. It turns out my body might be reacting to antidepressants. The annoying symptom? Night sweats. We thought it might be lymphoma. It wasn't. That was a fun couple of weeks. I'm terrified. I'm terrified that this won't be the end of it, that the next medicine will fail too, and those absolutely terrifying impulses to harm myself and the thoughts of failure that I tell myself I am over and over and over and over and over and over again will one day be too much. Will these thoughts that only seem to stop in short intervals darken into complete mental breakdown? My biggest fear isn't snakes or falling, it's that I will end up on the street and lose my intellect and sanity, being mocked by people who don't know what mental illness is like. I'm afraid that the loneliness I seem to NEVER break from free from will enslave me into a life of dependence on others. I was doing so well but maybe wellness is just an illusi...

It got bad when a man who made the world laugh couldn't make himself laugh. I think I realized very early on that life isn't guaranteed. One of my earliest memories is that of attending the funeral of my mother's grandmother. I remember walking up to the casket and seeing a human shell. I vividly understood the notion that the breath in my lungs would one day cease. Providence reminded me of this truth when as a teenager I came close to dying from one of seven collapsed lungs, the centrepiece of my transition from innocence into to the cold reality of human mortality. Age has brought much joy, but also the haunting notion that I am trudging to a definite end of this thing we call life. When my father, a person of whom time has kindled the deepest of admiration, suffered massive heart failure just over five years ago, I was reminded again of the profound value of breath. The will to survive exists because life is worth living. So why did a man who made the world laugh ta...

All of these facts are 40%-80% true. 1. Beards stop UV rays. That's right. A beard is more powerful than the freaking sun. 2. People fear them. Wait, that isn't a good thing you say? Well, people fear Batman.* 3. Nature gave us beards for a reason. 110% of beardless men experience the harshness of winter more severely then bearded men. Scientists have proven that those who lack the insulation in sub zero temperatures experience subtle brain grey matter loss. 4. Millions of children are confused by beardless fathers. A beard says to a child: "I love you, and this glorious beard is proof." Children of bearded men are 42% more likely to graduate with a Master's degree because a beard provides a sense of family pride. 5. In the ancient days, bearded Saints and Monks were legally allowed to kill you if you mocked and/or touched their beards. Beards symbolize piety and power, and the beard follicles of upright men have been known to alleviate sickness. 6. *...

Last month the movie Left Behind was released. The film is based on a 1995 novel by the same name written by Tim LaHaye. The movie and book are inspired by a theological theory regarding the second coming of Christ - that when Christ returns, he'll first make a secret pit stop on his way and kind of Star Trek beam all of his followers into heaven before all hell breaks lose. It is a widely held view of North American evangelicals. While I do not tend to take a hard-line approach on things pertaining to eschatology, there are some issues that I have with this particular rapture theory and I think it would be prudent to discuss some of them in perhaps a time when the film has raised some questions. I will simply refer to the pre-tribulation rapture theory (the Church is an away team in trouble and Scottie is God beaming them to safety) as "the rapture theory" for the sake of discussion.   The rapture theory is a very new theological position.  Of course just b...