Liberation Themes among Evangelicals

Last updated on: December 5, 2013 at 7:19 pm By Scot McKnight

“The culture wars, of the late twentieth century began, in part,” Molly Worthen contends, “as a civil war within evangelicalism” (177). So she states in her study of the “gospel of liberation” among evangelicals in her fine study, Apostles of Reason. In the 1960s some American evangelicals looked to the church’s precedents in dealing with the social tensions at work in American society. Two points: (1) “left”-leaning thinkers found resources in the martyr tradition, in the Reformation models of communes to... Read more

Mandela’s Walk to Freedom

Last updated on: December 5, 2013 at 5:47 pm By Scot McKnight

Our generation’s story of freedom The prosecutor’s name was Mr. Bosch and the accused a national hero Nelson Mandela, who tells his own story in a remarkable book called Long Walk to Freedom.[i] After years in imprisoned exile and then more days in prison connected to the trial and after the prosecutor had summoned more than a hundred witnesses, and with a court room wondering how many witnesses the accused would summon to the court, Mandela stood in his own... Read more

Madiba (1918-2013) RIP

Last updated on: December 5, 2013 at 3:57 pm By Scot McKnight

How Social Media Makes us Less Social (or?)

Last updated on: December 5, 2013 at 10:42 am By Scot McKnight

See this? HT: JS Read more

Super-Speed Evolution from AiG (RJS)

Last updated on: December 4, 2013 at 9:28 pm By RJS

My post earlier today dealt with the Tower of Babel and some of the problems introduced by a literal reading of this story. The story of Noah and the flood is another story where a literal reading requires some rather interesting contortions. Natural Historian had an interesting post on this topic last week: Invoking Super-Speed Evolution: How to Squeeze 10,000+ Bird Species onto Noah’s Ark. There are about 10,000 species of birds alive today. Almost 200 additional species have gone extinct... Read more

Babel in Ancient Context (RJS)

Last updated on: June 7, 2014 at 9:46 am By RJS

Standing alongside the garden, Cain and Abel, and the Flood we have a fourth classic Sunday School tale in the early chapters of Genesis, the Tower of Babel (2242 BC according to Bishop Ussher). This is followed within a couple hundred years by Abram’s move from Ur to Haran to the land of Canaan, his wandering to Egypt and back again to Canaan. The Tower of Babel is a tale that defies a literal reading. At least today it defies... Read more

Sermons and their Sources

Last updated on: December 5, 2013 at 5:46 am By Scot McKnight

I once was in a situation when a pastor admitted to me that he often re-preached sermons from sermon sources, and he also said he hadn’t thought there was anything wrong with it. What most confused me about the situation was that he was using illustrations from other preachers in the first person — and you really did think these experiences were his. He stopped. What are the issues? Here’s what I see: First, it is not honest. Part of... Read more

Men vs. Women, Nature vs. Nurture

Last updated on: December 3, 2013 at 5:12 pm By Scot McKnight

Source: “There is biology to some of the behavior we see among men and women,” said Ragini Verma, a University of Pennsylvania biomedical imaging analyst and lead author of the study. “In the population, men have stronger front-back connectivity, and women have inter-hemispheric or left-right connectivity more than the men. It’s not that one or the other gender lacks the connectivity altogether, it’s just that one is stronger than the other,” Verma said. That means men may be quicker on... Read more

The Story of those Christian Colleges

Last updated on: December 3, 2013 at 8:04 pm By Scot McKnight

At one time many American Christian colleges did not want, did not believe in, and did not want “accreditation” by a national body of accreditation. What those schools wanted was faithfulness to the Bible regardless of what the educrats of this world said. But that all changed, and one of the distinctive features of Molly Worthen’s fine study, Apostles of Reason, is her attention to the Christian college movement. Personal example: When I was first teaching at TEDS, our Moody students... Read more

It All Points to Jesus

Last updated on: December 3, 2013 at 6:52 pm By Scot McKnight

In his new book, Evangelical Theology, Mike Bird points to the centrality of Christ with these golden words: God is known to us most profoundly in the mediatorship of Jesus Christ, and it is through the economic relationship of Father-Son and Son-Spirit that we can glimpse into the Trinity. In creation, God makes the universe in, through, and for Jesus Christ. In revelation, Jesus Christ unveils the mystery of God, executing the divine covenant for redemption, hidden in ages past but... Read more