As a child, I was taught that the end time were approaching, that all true Christians would one day be raptured, transported straight to heaven, and that this would be followed by a Tribulation in which God would judge the earth. The tribulation would be a time of horror, a time of disaster and death. [...]
I often wondered as a child how Abraham or Moses could go to heaven if they hadn’t heard about Jesus. It is this question that Dispensationalism seeks to answer. Dispensationalism divides the history of humankind into seven “dispensations.” During each dispensation God dealt with humans differently, requiring different things of them. In each dispensation, humans [...]
Whether Christians are Postmillennialist, Amillennialist, or Premillennialist has a dramatic affect on how they view the world. Understanding this aids in understanding things like social justice, dominionism, and the culture wars. Postmillennialists, Amillennialists, and Premillennialists Catholics are generally Amillennialists while mainline Protestants are generally either Amillennialists or Postmillennialists. The distinction between the two is often [...]
I still remember the kitchen table debates, with charts spread out, Bibles open, and concordances on hand. Would the rapture happen before the tribulation, or during it, or after it? What role would the United States play in the end times? What area of the world would the antichrist be from? Could he possibly be [...]
I’ve written recently about conservative arguments that having abortions causes post traumatic stress disorder and ruins women’s lives, and that being gay means leading a destructive “lifestyle” that elevates your risk of suicide and depression. In each case I’ve pointed to self-fulfilling prophesies – if you can convince women having abortions that they are murdering [...]
To be more specific, creationism led me to a crisis of faith that ultimately, through some twists and turns, drove me out of the Christianity. My parents did not realize that in teaching me that literal young earth creationism was the foundation of Christianity they did not simply fortify my faith but rather gave my [...]
I wrote several days ago about how I was attracted to Catholicism because it offered me infallibility immediately after my belief in the infallibility of the Bible had been shaken. A second reason I was attracted to Catholicism was the beauty and ritual it offered. The first Catholic mass I ever went to was Easter [...]
Evangelical and fundamentalist positions on what happens to those who die as infants or children are all over the map. Some follow the Calvinist line that God has preordained where we are to spend eternity, and that therefore some children who die go to heaven while others go to hell. Some justify this by saying [...]
I have noticed a worrying trend among some Christians. It is the turn away from evidentialist apologetics toward presuppositionalist apologetics. Evidentialism holds that belief should rest on evidence. Presuppositionalism holds that belief rests on presuppositions. Evidentialist apologetics attempts to bring converts by revealing the evidence behind Christianity. Evidentialists say that scientific evidence actually supports Young [...]
When you have a lot of different terms floating around, it’s easy for things to get mixed up. So let me be clear about something: evangelicalism, fundamentalism, Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull, and the homeschool movement are not synonymous. In an attempt to avoid confusion, I’m going to take a moment to define each and to explain how [...]
Vision Forum (a homeschool publisher and major Christian patriarchy advocate) teaches that daughters are to obey their fathers and accept their authority over them until they marry, and that they are then to do the same with their husbands. Vision Forum claims that God speaks to a woman through her male authority, and that her [...]
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