“I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible... Read more
Well-known evangelical — originally conservative and then more progressive — Clark Pinnock came to view eternal conscious punishment as an “outrageous doctrine” (Rethinking Hell, 60). He begins his famous essay with Augustine upon whom he lays responsibility for the traditionalist view. Augustine believed God would torment sinners/the wicked mentally, psychologically and physically endlessly — and when Augustine was challenged how that could happen without their being destroyed, Augustine believed God would ongoingly perform miracles to keep them alive. Quoting John... Read more
Laidlaw College student leaders, Jeremy Kendall and Fiona Sherwin, love the Cubs. Aotearoa (New Zealand) loves the Cubs! Jeremy has also now officially replaced his Yankees hat. We had to do a Haka for awhile before he became comfortable, but peace came and he has now found the faith of the good guys. The kingdom has arrived on the land of the long cloud. Follow Jeremy at Twitter. Read more
By Derek Thompson. Wow, I had not heard this: More than ever, young people are living in their parents’ basements. You’ve surely heard that one before. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, and others have repeated it over and over in the last few years. More than 15.3 million twentysomethings—and half of young people under 25—live “in their parents’ home,” according to official Census statistics. There’s just one problem with those official statistics. They’re criminally misleading. When you read the full Census reports,... Read more
In the last post on Four Views on the Historical Adam we looked at the view of Adam put forth by C. John Collins. He takes an old earth special creation view, but is willing to consider a wide range of scenarios that fit within certain limits. For example, an old earth and an evolutionary description of the diversity of animal life poses no theological problems if this is where the scientific evidence leads. However, he does not think humans... Read more
Some of you may remember when J.R. Briggs decided, a bit on a lark, to host a conference called “Epic Fail.” Well, it spun out of control quite successfully. J.R. Briggs has a new book called Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure. It’s a good book, and I know of no pastors or elders or deacons who don’t need to understand what this book is about. He does not glorify failure; the book admits failure and... Read more
From The Atlantic, by Tanya Basu: The handover in houses of worship across the country is not a straightforward case of an increase in non-Christian immigrants in the United States. In fact, many church sales can be attributed to shifts among Christian denominations.Roman Catholic weekly service attendance has slid from 75 percent in 1955 to 45 percent in the mid-2000s, while Southern Baptist and Evangelical churches have seen big drops in attendance, partially due to a split within the Protestant church between mainline Protestantism and Evangelicals.... Read more
Ted Campbell: You know the story: America’s mighty mainline Protestant churches once stretched from sea to shining sea, embracing the vast majority of American people who worshiped week after week, filling glorious churches with their hymns of praise. But, alas, they are now reduced to a handful of aging folks who can scarcely pay to keep the church furnace running. In a few weeks they’ll all be gone. Martin Marty has written that the story of “mainline decline” is so... Read more
When John Stott’s views were aired publicly in a book called Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (a public debate with a well-known English liberal, David Edwards), evangelical shook. His view was that the wicked will be annhilated; that is, Stott made it public that he — as true-blue an evangelical as one could find — was a conditionalist. I was a young professor at TEDS when that book was published, and I offered a bit of a response at the... Read more
In the newest edition of Mutuality, a church-shaped magazine for the uplifting of women by egalitarians, Mimi Haddad, President of Christians for Biblical Equality, observes that there is one gospel but two worldviews (the topic of the most recent Mutuality). By the way, I prefer to call my own view “mutualist” or “mutuality” instead of “egalitarian,” because the term egalitarians is used as an idea fueled by the Enlightenment more than the Bible. And the habit of the complementarians to call themselves... Read more
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