Sadly, our friend Fred Craddock, the most masterful of all old Southern preachers, has gone to be with Jesus at age 86. Here are a couple of samples of our friend Fred. He was here only a couple of years ago in Lexington preaching the anniversary sermon at the oldest Christian Church in the area. It was a treat. He was the best preacher I ever heard at Lake Junalaska growing up, at Annual Conference meetings. If you don’t know… Read more

Our topic for this post is ‘freedom of speech’. You will often hear it said “in a democracy, obviously there should be freedom of speech, it’s just common sense”. Yet there is not a single democracy where there are not laws limiting freedom of speech— laws against libelous remarks, laws against hate speech, laws against verbal threats of various sorts. In other words, there are no democracies where there is an absolutely unfettered right to freedom of speech, nor should… Read more

“Everyone should have the right to get married, it’s just common sense”. I’ll bet you’ve heard that one before. Let me just say at the outset, I’m not concerned with the whole argument over civil unions performed by a justice of the peace. Secular law is one thing, Christian marriage is another. When it comes to Christian marriage, marriage is not a right at all— it is a privilege granted by God, and some would even say, it’s a sacrament—… Read more

Yet another harangue you hear these days after the exclamation “it’s just common sense” is “we should demand our rights”. Unfortunately, we now live in the ‘entitlement’ age, where everyone wants to demand their rights, and too few people are willing to take responsibility for their actions. I can’t even go through a day without seeing maybe a dozen ads for law firms who are going to ‘help you get what’s coming to you, by right’. We are being urged… Read more

I’ve grown weary of so many Christians using the phrase “well it’s just common sense!” I’ve grown weary of it especially when what follows this exclamation is usually ideas which are not compatible with what the Bible says. Take for example “neither a borrower nor a lender be”. I’ve heard that one quoted quite a lot following the exclamation about common sense. This word just in— that’s not in the Bible and it’s not even compatible with what’s in the… Read more

Sometimes things are just not as advertized. This movie is one of them. It has a few good scenes. One of the better ones can be viewed above. It also has a boat load of the F word and the S word, and some absolutely grotesque violence scenes, including one in a church in Kentucky, supposedly. We folks don’t behave like that in church, not even in the snake handling churches— honest. I understand that this movie is something of… Read more

It is the conclusion of Richard Hays that we “must learn to read Israel’s Scriptures not only through the filtering lens of modern critical methods, but also through the eyes of John and other authors of the canonical Gospels” (p. 93). Thus “the hermeneutical key to this intertextual dialectic is the practice of figural reading: the discernment of unexpected patterns of correspondence between earlier and later events or persons within a continuous temporal stream.” Such a reading is only possible,… Read more

http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/02/26/finding-jesus-season-1-episode-1.cnn/video/playlists/finding-jesus/” title=”Finding Jesus” Read more

When you are dealing with a docu-drama, sometimes it’s hard to get the balance right between education and what is dramatically effective on the screen. The first episode of Finding Jesus was indeed well filmed, the cinematography was excellent, and it involved a nice array of voices as the talking heads interspersed between the recreations of the scenes related to the burial shroud of Jesus. Obviously, the focus was on the shroud, now called the shroud of Turin. There was… Read more

12) In the second volume of the Lightfoot Legacy series, the volume on the Gospel of John to be published next year, Lightfoot says almost exactly the same thing you do about Jesus as Temple and the fulfillment of the Festivals etc. and about the backwards reading of the Scriptures as exhibited in John as well. It is interesting as well that he insists as you do on p. 131 n. 24 that the backwards reading does not negate the… Read more