Charles Ventura: Texas pastor Robert Jeffress, one of President Trump’s evangelical advisers, said that God has given the president “full control” to take out North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. In a statement to CBN News Tuesday, the First Baptist Dallas pastor wrote that a biblical passage in the book of Romans endowed “rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil.” “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out... Read more
Chapter 14 of Alister McGrath’s book A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology deals with the question of teleology and directionality in evolution. The neo-Darwinian paradigm, (that popularized by Richard Dawkins for example), is that evolution is an undirected, highly contingent, random process. Evolution simply operates to preserve the replication of genetic information. McGrath quotes Stephen Jay Gould: “We are the accidental result of an unplanned process…. the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities,... Read more
Each local church, whether radically independent or associated with a larger denomination, institutionalizes a conversion orientation. A church does this by the way it presents the gospel, by the way it teaches Sunday School, by the way it preaches from the pulpit, by the way it shapes the programs and platforms. Some kind of conversion theory is at work in every church. One can, then, look at conversion as location — as something happens in connection with a specific place... Read more
Some, not many, church groups do not believe in the use of musical instruments in public worship. The major example is the Churches of Christ. No less than one of their foremost scholars, Everett Ferguson, takes up his case agains the use of instruments in public worship (The Early Church and Today, vol. 1). What are the arguments against the use of instruments? First, Christians sang in public worship already in the apostolic era: 1 Cor 14:15, 26; Hebrews 2:12;... Read more
“How should we live?” That’s the question so many today want to ask Paul — and about as many answers as the numbers of those who ask him the question! There are tensions when one asks this question of Paul — he was after a Jew and a Jew would say “Obey the commands.” But many think that’s not what Paul would say. This question has been posed in a remarkably sensitive manner by James Thompson, at Abilene Christian University,... Read more
Following up on his What is fundamentalism?, Roger Olson asks what liberal theology is. You can read more of his post at the link. This is Roger’s really good book on it: The Journey of Modern Theology. Here are Olson’s major themes for liberal theology: In other words, according to Welch, and many others within the liberal tradition of modern Christianity, “the best of modern thought” is a source and norm for Christian theology (and ethics) alongside the Bible and... Read more
The opening chapter of Old Earth or Evolutionary Creation? focuses on the boundaries that define BioLogos and Reasons to Believe. Deborah Haarsma of BioLogos and Hugh Ross and Kenneth Samples of RTB describe the aims and unifying themes of their organizations. Robert Stewart of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary moderated the chapter. There is much to discuss here – but I would like to focus on one specific response by Hugh Ross and Kenneth Samples to a question posed by... Read more
What Greg Boyd thinks is a problem — the Cruciformity of God in Christ vs. the Warrior God of some Old Testament passages — others think is not a problem. One specific form of the non-problem-with-God is to pose God as the God of wrath and argue that every human being deserves the wrath of God, deserves the wrath of the Warrior God. Therefore, since the Warrior God was at work in pouring out wrath on Christ on the cross,... Read more
Mike Bird has enlisted me in a collection of posts by “bibliobloggers” and the question is What book do I like that others might be surprised I like? I read for a living — reading and writing and teaching and reading some more for teaching and writing. But I also read for pleasure. My habit is to work from about 7:30am to around 2pm and then after that I tend to read what I want — desultory reading is the... Read more
What does Jesus mean when he says “Blessed are those who…”? What does it mean to be blessed or bless-ed? This is the question Jonathan Pennington attempts to answer in his new important book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. It’s one of the most important questions for the interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount, and he has gone to considerable depths in his virtue-ethics understanding of “blessed” as “human flourishing.” I’ll give his basics. I have... Read more
Jesus Creed
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In