Beyond the Abyss 7

Last updated on: October 11, 2010 at 12:26 pm By Scot McKnight

Traditional Christian thinking has a fundamental belief in retributive justice at work in its concepts about grace, forgiveness, and even love. Let’s be clear here: The sacrificial system required, for God to forgive, a sacrifice that cost the person something and someone had to pay; both satisfaction and substitutionary atonement theories conceptualize God’s grace, God’s love, and God’s forgiveness occurring through and in and after the death of the Son. Sharon Baker is calling into question whether this is the... Read more

Someone to Follow

Last updated on: October 11, 2010 at 12:27 pm By Scot McKnight

Contemporary Westerners, particularly 20-30somethings, have had the church world turned inside out in their face, and some of them have experienced the netherworld of the church personally. Instead of trusting the church, they are hesitant to trust — but they are willing to ponder trusting an authentic person. The one worth trusting, and the one to whom we can give our One.Life is Jesus. In my next book, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow, I make a case for Jesus being... Read more

A (coffee) Confession

Last updated on: October 11, 2010 at 1:57 pm By Scot McKnight

I have to make a confession. I abandoned my trusty AeroPress coffee maker for my office after an experience in Ireland last summer with Nespresso’s simple, no-frills, no-hassles, no-fail espresso machine (Nespresso C110-US-GR-NE CitiZ). My colleague, Joel Willitts, supports me when I say, “This is one fine espresso machine.” No matter how purist I have been with my home Rancilio Silvia, grinding my own beans with a hand grinder, no matter how much I’ve been committed to that machine …... Read more

Creation Untamed 1

Last updated on: October 15, 2010 at 3:20 pm By Scot McKnight

“… if God cares for so much for all creatures, why didn’t God create a world in which there would be no natural disasters?” That question, by Terence Fretheim, professor at Luther Seminary in Minneapolis in his fifth decade of teaching, is perhaps one of the best questions we could perhaps face. Yes, bad things happen, but why does God create a world in which bad things happen? This is one of the questions he addresses in his slender but... Read more

But which God? 1

Last updated on: October 9, 2010 at 12:16 pm By Scot McKnight

How do you decide what God is like? Do you observe nature and infer and speculate and ponder? Do you boil down the world’s religions and come up with a synthetic image of God? Do you decide what God is like all by yourself? Do you plug into one religion and take that God as the true God? Seriously, where do you get your ideas of God? Or, and this might surprise some, how do Christians decide what God is... Read more

What’s their best song?

Last updated on: October 9, 2010 at 7:49 pm By Scot McKnight

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Electing God’s Plan

Last updated on: October 10, 2010 at 7:46 am By Scot McKnight

From WaPo: Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell told the Christian Broadcasting Network last week that that she believes it was God plan for her to campaign and ultimately, to win: “God continued to strengthen and empower us when, you know, His strength is perfected in our weakness. And that’s what’s exciting because you see, that if it weren’t for faith, when all logic said it’s time to quit, we pursued. We marched on because we knew God was not releasing... Read more

The Gospel of John: A new commentary

Last updated on: October 9, 2010 at 7:24 pm By Scot McKnight

In 1971 Leon Morris’s commentary on John was published and for a good two decades was the standard go-to commentary for evangelicals. Since then many others have appeared, but none of those by evangelicals has involved the painstaking work that we find in J. Ramsey Michaels’ decades-long efforts: The Gospel of John (New International Commentary on the New Testament). What’s your favorite study of John? Here’s what I will say: this Commentary will become standard; it is both conservative and... Read more

Prayer of the Week

Last updated on: September 27, 2010 at 8:43 am By Scot McKnight

Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. Read more

To Heal or Not To Heal?

Last updated on: October 9, 2010 at 2:23 pm By Scot McKnight

It’s all so simple to some folks: pray and you will be healed. To others it’s not simple: they prayed, they searched into the depths of the heart and pleaded from those depths to God for healing, and nothing happened. What then? For some it’s so simple; pray and you will be healed. But by most accounts healing is much less present today than it was, say, in New Testament times — Jesus healed and healed and healed, and Paul... Read more