In the HBO series “John Adams,” Adams calls Abigail, his wife, My Friend. He says she was his number one ballast; she was his advisor; and friend. What one word best describes your relationship to your ministry spouse? What one word would your ministry spouse use to describe your relationship? Scot McKnight’s response: when it comes to ministry situations with us, Kris is (among other things) my soundingboard and I think she would see herself as (among other things) supporter/analyst.... Read more

These words are in red in most of our Bibles because they are from Jesus: 37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 40 “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever... Read more

This is the third in our brief (and much more needs to be said about all kinds of terms and verses — like “prophetic” vs. “apocalyptic”) sketch of a partial preterist view of Mark 13. This view, I’d like folks to know, is not new — it is in fact old. Modern scholars who argue something along this line, with variations, include RC Sproul, GB Caird, RT France, and NT Wright. There seems to be a rise of evangelicals who... Read more

We can’t analyze these three verses in James 1 all at once, but I want to provide the text today and offer a couple of comments: 13 When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; 14 but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. 15 Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is... Read more

We saw a bumper sticker the other day that, however much of a sound byte approach to a profound issue, said: “Guns cause murder the way gnats cause garbage.” OK, that’s clever. But we can read on most any web magazine today about the man who murdered a pastor in a church near St Louis last Sunday morning and a man who killed 10 in the South. Without access to handguns, these senseless murders don’t happen. It is Constitutional, but... Read more

We finish today the book by Jean Twenge, a book that provides powerful statistics about generation trends. Her book is called  Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before). What do you think of this book? Which generational trends do you think are most significant today? I want to summarize some of the conclusions she draws: “Generation Me has the highest self-esteem of any generation, but also the most depression. We are... Read more

Part two in our series on the eschatology of Jesus. A word about this so-called “third” quest for the historical Jesus. In the wake of WWII Christian scholars awoke to the view that their understandings of Judaism were skewed and those understandings distorted our understandings of ancient Judaism and both Jesus and Paul. So, scholars began to quarry the mines of ancient Jewish evidence – apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, targums (Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament), and the... Read more