Beyond Coincidence

by Dr. Chuck Missler

For the Love of Codes

What child doesn’t love a good spy book, complete with clues and ciphers? As young people, we delighted in passwords and vocabulary that only our best friends understood. We invented secret codes and used them to pass messages that nobody else could read. Some of us liked code-making and code-breaking so much that we became cryptologists as adults.

Not only do we love codes, but sometimes they’re indispensable. When all other forms of communication breakdown, ships can still signal each other in Morse code with flashes of light. Prisoners locked behind walls of silence can tap tap their way to knowledge about each other. Children can know a stranger was not sent by Mom to pick them up, because the stranger doesn’t know Mom’s code phrase. Codes have many real-life uses.

The Rhetoric On Rhetoric

by Chris Corlett

In the appendix of his definitive work Cosmic Codes: Hidden Messages from the Edge of Eternity, Dr. Missler lists nearly two hundred rhetorical devices employed throughout the Holy Bible. Dr. Missler writes, “Many forms of multi-level and reflexive codes and rhetorical devices… are employed in communication and language, and the Biblical corpus of text is no exception.” He continues, “The exploitation of metaphors, analogies, similes and types in the Bible is particularly provocative in that they often reach across the individual authors and the era in which they were written.”

But what of rhetoric? Aristotle defines rhetoric as the ability to see or identify in any given circumstance the available means of persuasion. The rhetorician wants not merely to communicate a truth and sets the more ambitious goal to convince the hearer to act on that truth. Paul makes a distinction between “teaching” and “preaching” in Acts 15:35 which is echoed when he lists the various ministry titles in Ephesians 4:11. In this passage, the role of the “evangelist” is listed alongside that of the “teacher.” The distinction is intuitive if not explicitly stated — teaching explains and directs while preaching proclaims and motivates. Paul wrote to Timothy to “(p)reach the word (and) reprove, rebuke (and) exhort.” Preaching incorporates these additional commitments above and beyond those of teaching. As a public school mathematics teacher of over twenty years, job one was to teach the skills and concepts of algebra, geometry and calculus. I measured successful learning through summative assessments. When a student pursued study in higher education in mathematics, I passed a much more exciting test. Could I move from just conveying knowledge to also exciting learning? When successful, students went from being taught mathematics to being caught by mathematics!

New and Improved Koinonia Institute

by Graham Preston

The History and Background

Koinonia Institute (KI) was launched more than 10 years ago to help “equip the saints for the work of ministry.” It has been focused on three supporting areas:

To provide instructional programs to facilitate serious study of the Bible among thinking Christians;
To encourage and facilitate both individual and small group weekly study programs for personal growth; and
To research, monitor and publish information to stimulate awareness of the strategic trends that impact our times and our personal ministries and stewardships.

KI is committed to accomplishing these goals through a program of lifelong learning — exploiting the Internet — and the creation and development of an intelligence network among its members.