Good without a God?

Last updated on: August 21, 2013 at 6:32 am By Scot McKnight

Can there be good without God? Or, is morality possible without God Or, is morality possible in a naturalistic worldview? Paul Copan, in his essay “Ethics Need God,” in Debating Christian Theism (ed. JP Moreland, C. Meister, K.A. Sweis), argues that Christian theism provides a much firmer foundation for morality than naturalism. Note this: Copan does not argue that only theists believe objective morality exists, that belief in God is required for morality, that atheists or nontheists are immoral, etc.. He’s... Read more

Phone Etiquette by Country

Last updated on: August 15, 2013 at 8:10 am By Scot McKnight

Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually. Read more

Weddings: Too Expensive?

Last updated on: August 15, 2013 at 8:13 am By Scot McKnight

The latest numbers from XO Group, Inc: On March 7, 2013, XO Group Inc. released results of their annual Real Weddings Study, something I stumbled on while doing research for another writing project. This report surveyed over 17,000 brides to find out how much they spent on their weddings. Here are some highlights: Average Wedding Budget: $28,427 (excludes honeymoon) Most Expensive Place to Get Married: Manhattan, $76,678 average spent Least Expensive Place to Get Married: Alaska, $15,504 average spent Average Spent on... Read more

The Origin of Life (RJS)

Last updated on: August 20, 2013 at 6:52 am By RJS

Among the issues shaping the origins debate, the most complex scientific questions surround the origin of life. Gerald Rau outlines some of the confusion and uncertainty concerning the origin of life in chapter 4 of his book Mapping the Origins Debate: Six Models of the Beginning of Everything. I’ve written on this before, but it bears repeating with emphasis. From the point of view of science, the origin of life is a wide open problem with a great deal of... Read more

Restoring a Woman’s Good, but Lost, Reputation

Last updated on: August 20, 2013 at 7:12 am By Scot McKnight

When you have time, read Judges 19, where you will the sordid story of a Levite, his concubine, and a plot that thickens into a sickening display of violence. My colleague Claude Mariottini in Rereading the Biblical Text: Searching for Meaning and Understanding, sorts this text out wonderfully. I’ve enclosed the text below, so read it first if you have time. 1. Some translations say the woman played the part of a whore or harlot or, as the NIV 2011... Read more

The Academic “I”

Last updated on: August 12, 2013 at 7:38 am By Scot McKnight

From Patter: The first major thinker who used “I” that I recall was E.P. Sanders in his Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and Sanders changed the game for many biblical scholars. Academics who write without an “I” have denied the personal context of all work; I-less writing is insufferably pseudo-objective. It might seem that once you have made the decision to write as ‘I’ it’s just straightforward from then on in. Unfortunately, this is not so. There are conventions about the use... Read more

Atonement Debates

Last updated on: August 12, 2013 at 7:33 am By Scot McKnight

When I was a seminary student the atonement battle, as we were taught it, was between CH Dodd, who turned propitiation (the wrath of God pacified) into expiation (the sin of humans removed), and LL Morris, whose dissertation was published and republished and republished as The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. Morris was a strong defender of propitiation and the atonement as an act in which God offered a substitutionary sacrifice that absorbed the punishment due to humans. Leon Morris’ work... Read more

Egypt’s Pogrom

Last updated on: August 18, 2013 at 8:21 pm By Scot McKnight

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, known for relentless observation and investigation of anti-Semitism and marking out explicit intolerances, has called the Egyptian persecutions a pogrom: The Simon Wiesenthal Center expressed its horror and outrage over the Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) pogrom thathas destroyed at least 50 Coptic Christian Churches in Egypt. “While we do not condone the deaths of any innocent protesters in Egypt —nothing can justify such attacks,” charged Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper the founder and dean and associate dean... Read more

The Right Kind of Place

Last updated on: August 19, 2013 at 6:39 am By Scot McKnight

Whatever approach you take to reading Genesis 1-2 I think we can agree with John Collins when he says Genesis 1-2 makes the earth the “right kind of place in which we live out our story” — before God our creator. This conclusion of Collins’s is found in his chapter “Reading Genesis 1-2 with the Grain: Analogical Days” in J. Daryl Charles, Reading Genesis one-two: An Evangelical Conversation. Now a big point about how some read Genesis 1-2 and I... Read more

Incarnation’s Significance

Last updated on: August 19, 2013 at 6:27 am By Scot McKnight

The Incarnation of God in Christ has become fashionable. Not only does it mean God has taken up our case by becoming what we are, but it has also reached into a “theology of creation” — or the excellence of creation and the justification of life in this world. A recent example of probing Incarnation can be found in the mesmerizing book by Christian Wiman called My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. Wiman’s approach is not from or... Read more

What is the Christian holy day typically observed with rest and worship?