The recent discussion about the rhetorical nature of language about heaven and hell leads me to reflect some on a classic, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progess. Our BTS Dept at NPU is writing a monthly column in The Covenant Companion and mine (on Bunyan) is schedule to appear in August or September. (I just know [...]

McLaren’s The Last Word and the Word After That This is a slightly edited version of an earlier blog. In this blog I will interact with Brian McLaren’s helpful and provocative new book that seeks to deconstruct “hell” language as a rhetoric that sets people on edge in order to persuade them to embrace a [...]

I’m not quite done with McLaren’s The Last Word and the Word After That but I’ve come to a point where I want to put some of his book in perspective. Two observations tonight. First, a smaller one but one that needs to be said. McLaren’s essential stance in this latest novel (or whatever one [...]

If you’ve followed these blogs about hell, you’ll know that I got them going before I started reading The Last Word and the Word After That. And of the blogs I had planned had to do with the role historical judgment has played in how many speak of hell. My mind is slow after a [...]

When my editor friend suggested that I blog, I balked. Mostly because I didn’t know what it really was all about, but also because I never anticipated it would be this much fun. Maybe I’ll burn out with this and someday just stop but for right now this has been a wonderful ride with others [...]

In yesterday’s very active blog about Dark Thoughts some commented on what they “hoped” while some others thought such “hopes” were unbiblical and misplaced. I offer here not so much what I believe and what I will eventually state in these blogs, but why it is that many of us really do “hope” Dark Thoughts, [...]

As a college student, and over in Belgium on a mission trip where I learned so much about the bigness of the Church, I was fortunate enough to be able to sit daily and listen to John R.W. Stott preach. He said something that has never left me, and it pertains to what we are [...]

Kevin Corcoran, from Calvin, writes in Books and Culture on a topic that many of my students have recently asked me about: hell. The questions came up well before McLaren’s book, which I’ll be working my way through shortly. Corcoran is asking a question that needs to be asked at some serious levels, both lay [...]

I’m up here in Seattle, and Doug Pagitt’s heart-felt record of his church’s, Solomon’s Porch, work, called Reimagining Spiritual Formation, which for many Emergent folk is “old hat,” was a wondrous read and gave me many things to think about. But I begin with this one and it is a Question: What should 50somethings say [...]

The final chapter of DA Carson’s book is a biblical meditation on Truth and Experience, and largely a gentle, but well-informed, commentary on 2 Peter 1. Here’s his opening line: “A good deal of the discussion of this book could be recast as a debate between the claims of truth and the claims of experience” [...]