I’ve had it easy: my father was distant, not devilish. Either way, we need to realize that we all fall short — in different ways and to different degrees, yes, but all without exception. Fathers often aspire to do better for their children than their fathers did for them, often by giving them what they wanted to get and did not — but the children may want something different from what the fathers provide. The road to reconnection starts with the realization that we’re all sinners, and that we should condemn not, lest we be condemned (Luke 6:37).

If you have strained or broken relationships with parents (even deceased ones), how can you forgive them for their sinful failings and defects? How can you learn to view them through gracious lenses?
I’m not a trained counselor, but I had a strained relationship with my dad (who died in 1984), and over the last few years I have walked a slow journey toward understanding, mercy, and forgiveness. So let me try to answer these two questions by sharing some parts of my story. My story is unique, as is everyone’s. But perhaps, as you consider the path God has led me down, your own next steps will become clearer.
How Can I Forgive?
Let’s start with the question of forgiveness. It’s easier to forgive when we can see some of the benefits a bad experience brought. Since my father did not abuse me or harm me in the ways we sometimes read about in newspapers — others have it tougher — I eventually realized that my father’s defects actually made my life easier in three ways: easier to feel successful, easier to do what I wanted, and easier, through God’s grace, to profess Christ.
Good From the Bad
It was easier to feel successful because, as I grew up, my mother constantly disparaged my father, essentially labeling him a lazy loser. That wasn’t fair: he worked consistently for forty years, didn’t get drunk, and didn’t beat her — but he was also an underachieving Harvard graduate. She didn’t respect him because he didn’t get the respect she thought he deserved.
The other day, half a century after seeing it in a theater, I streamed Love Story, set at Harvard. A successful student-athlete there has an ultra-strained relationship with his father, an old-money, elite lawyer who competed in the 1928 Olympics. The son, who calls his dad “Sir,” has a high bar to leap and feels he can never meet Sir’s expectations. I, on the other hand, could feel successful by leaping over a low bar. That’s not bad.
My dad was not absent, but he was distant. I suffered in some ways as a result, but I also gained independence by not caring much what my father thought. I left Judaism at age fourteen without worrying about his disapproval. Later I could tell him about my coming to faith in Christ and my upcoming marriage to a shicksa, a non-Jew, without concern about his disapproval.
I believe I’d have had the guts and good sense to marry Susan regardless, but a few Jews with good paternal relationships become petrified at that point. More are lassoed by Jesus but keep tugging on the rope — or they at least keep their changed thinking secret to avoid upsetting parents. That’s not sensible, since Yeshua proclaimed his Jewishness as he said he’s the Christ. Either way, I never had that problem.
Unseen Sacrifices
Forgiveness in Christianity, of course, means more than relenting in resenting: it involves sacrifice. God forgives us because of Christ’s supreme expression of love. The famous line in Love Story is “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” but I truly love my father only by sacrificing my pride and being sorry for never thanking him for all he did for me.
His gift started with giving me life, of course, and continued to his material provision for me. I was able to graduate from an expensive college with almost no debt. My father had no car until he was thirty, but I grew up with driving privileges and did not have to pay for them.
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UN Resolution 181 (1947) divided Palestine into a Jewish State (Israel) and an Arab state (Jordan). Then began a series of wars: Israel’s War for Independence (1948–49), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (the Hamas attack on Israel was carried out 50 years plus one day of the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War), the First Lebanon War of1982, and then the Second Lebanon War of 2006. This is but a partial list of Arab-Israeli conflicts. Why the focus upon history? The Hamas terrorist attack upon Israel reflects a one hundred year history of Arab animosity to the West and sets the context for the seemingly endless conflict over Israeli/Palestinian territory. How quickly we forget.

A number of friends, church folk, and Riddleblog readers have asked about my take on Israel’s 911 (10/7). So, here you go.
It won’t surprise you that my take on the Hamas’s vicious attack on Southern Israel is much different than Greg Laurie’s (“Fasten Your Seat Belts”). A legion of prophecy pundits and “end-times” YouTubers have popped up, many offering wild and bizarre speculation about the tragedy and its role in the end-times. This is what they do. Admittedly, I have not watched or read much of this recent prophecy speculation, but what I have seen (most of which folks have sent to me) is largely a re-hash of prophetic scenarios long-since discredited (by the embarrassing fact that they got it wrong when previously proposed) now re-packed and presented as new material, with the hope that people will forget how wrong the pundits were the last time they made such predictions.
My points for consideration:
1). As for any biblical significance to the horrors inflicted upon Israeli citizens by Hamas terrorists, this clearly falls under the category of signs given us by Jesus regarding wars and rumors of wars (Matthew 24:6-8). Jesus did not predict specific conflicts (such as this one), only what he describes as “birth pains” of the end. What happened in Southern Israel falls into the category of “wars and rumor of wars,” with no specific fulfillment of any biblical prophecy regarding Israel. What Hamas did was very much like what Vladimir Putin did in his barbaric invasion of Ukraine. He ignored all conventional rules of war and inflicted savagery upon innocents—the elderly, women and children, and unarmed civilians. Hamas has done the same in Israel. In this we see the depths of human depravity as divine image-bearers are slaughtered merely to satisfy someone’s rage, anger, and territorial ambitions. Jesus told us to expect as much until he returns.
2). It is important that we keep some historical perspective on what happened on 10/7. This is why I chose the picture of British General Allenby entering Jerusalem in 1917. When a Christian British general entered Jerusalem (a holy city for Jews, Christians, and Muslims) it meant the end of the Ottoman empire’s centuries-long rule over Palestine as well as the end of the Islamic Caliphate’s control of the region. But the heavy-handed British occupation helped to set in motion the series of events which sowed the seeds of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict one hundred years ago and which is still with us today.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the rallying cause of early Zionism. With the end of the Great War came the ill-conceived Treaty of Versailles (1919), in which the victorious entente powers divvied up the Middle East into new states which had never previously existed (e.g., Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Kuwait) and which had no real cultural or ethnic unity (see my review of Andelman’s A Shattered Peace).
Then came the Holocaust, which created the impetus for the United Nations to establish a Jewish state in Palestine to which the displaced Jews of the world could emigrate. UN Resolution 181 (1947) divided Palestine into a Jewish State (Israel) and an Arab state (Jordan). Then began a series of wars: Israel’s War for Independence (1948–49), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (the Hamas attack on Israel was carried out 50 years plus one day of the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War), the First Lebanon War of1982, and then the Second Lebanon War of 2006. This is but a partial list of Arab-Israeli conflicts.
Why the focus upon history? The Hamas terrorist attack upon Israel reflects a one hundred year history of Arab animosity to the West and sets the context for the seemingly endless conflict over Israeli/Palestinian territory. How quickly we forget.
3). If you are interested in the details of how Hamas was able to pull this attack off, and why the IDF was caught so unaware, here’s a highly recommended discussion of how and why it happened, and where we go from here: School of War — Episodes 93: Michael Doran on the War in Israel and Ghosts of 1973.
4). Many readers of the Riddleblog, long-time White Horse Inn listeners, church friends, and recent converts to Reformed theology may have given up their dispensationalism.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Thursday, April 25, 2024
The operative word in Augustine’s view is that regenerating grace is monergistic. It is the work of God alone. Pelagius rejected the doctrine of monergistic grace and replaces it with a view of synergism, which involves a work of cooperation between God and man.

The early part of the fifth century witnessed a serious controversy in the church that is known as the Pelagian controversy. This debate took place principally between the British monk Pelagius and the great theologian of the first millennium, Augustine of Hippo. In the controversy, Pelagius objected strenuously to Augustine’s understanding of the fall, of grace, and of predestination. Pelagius maintained that the fall affected Adam alone and that there was no imputation of guilt or “original sin” to Adam’s progeny. Pelagius insisted that people born after the fall of Adam and Eve retained the capacity to live lives of perfect righteousness unaided by the grace of God. He argued that grace “facilitates” righteousness but is not necessary for it. He categorically rejected Augustine’s understanding that the fall was so severe that it left the descendents of Adam in such a state of moral corruption that they were morally unable to incline themselves to God. The doctrines of Pelagius were condemned by the church in 418 at a synod in Carthage.
Though Pelagianism was rejected by the church, efforts soon emerged to soften the doctrines of Augustine. In the fifth century the leading exponent of such a softening was John Cassian. Cassian, who was the abbot of a monastery in Gaul, together with his fellow monks, completely agreed with the condemnation of Pelagius by the synod in 418, but they objected equally to the strong view of predestination set forth by Augustine. Cassian believed that Augustine had gone too far in his reaction against the heresy of Pelagius and had departed from the teachings of some of the church fathers, especially Tertullian, Ambrose, and Jerome. Cassian said that Augustine’s teaching on predestination “cripples the force of preaching, reproof, and moral energy…plunges men into despair and introduces a certain fatal necessity.” This reaction against the implied fatalism of predestination led Cassian to articulate a position that has since become known popularly as “semi-Pelagianism.” Semi-Pelagianism, as the name implies, suggests a middle ground between Pelagius and Augustine. Though grace facilitates a life of righteousness, Pelagius thought it was not necessary. Cassian argues that grace not only facilitates righteousness, but it is an essential necessity for one to achieve righteousness. The grace that God makes available to people, however, can and is often rejected by them.
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