For anyone who tires of the pop singers crooning about Our Lord, the sales, the NBA matchups, and even the Christmas carols (do we even sing about Easter this long?), a retread of thoughts about what Jewish persons and Muslims might feel with one-twelfth of the calendar devoted to Christmas: In the mood of the season, I found a Youtu.be video with Frank Sinatra’s rendition of Hark, The Herald Angels Sing. Maybe yours doesn’t but my mind boggled (again). Frank... Read more
The incarnation technically started inside the womb of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, God veiled in human flesh happened well before the nativity scene in Bethlehem. So if you want to celebrate the incarnation — which many people are doing (not the Milwaukee Bucks or Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers) this day — you may want to look for a holy day somewhere in late March, to mark the nine months that Jesus likely spent in the womb. Unfortunately, that would mean celebrations of... Read more
If you are working with someone, and especially if you are friendly, chances are you don’t bring up dirt on them in a very public way. You might make an indirect reference in a private, casual setting to a certain failing in a peer, perhaps among people who are sympathetic. At a board or faculty meeting, you likely don’t bring it up in your presentation. And if speaking to the press about the organization’s work and people associated with it,... Read more
With all the scorn directed at U.S. evangelicals over their vote and support for Donald Trump, many of American evangelicalism’s biggest critics have ignored the recent UK general election’s result — namely, a return of a Prime Minister who is unsure of how many children he has fathered: If Boris Johnson becomes the UK’s new prime minister on December 12, he will re-enter No. 10 Downing Street with an extraordinary fact missing from his biography: the number of children he... Read more
The Garden of Gethsemane is an odd place for Jesus’ privilege to become evident since that was the spot where Judas Iscariot betrayed him and where the soldiers arrested Jesus. But after Peter draws his sword, swings, and misses one of the soldier’s neck — he hit an ear instead — Jesus says this: “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. 53 Do you think that I cannot appeal... Read more
Those were the days: At the beginning of the twentieth century this distinction between mainline and evangelical Protestantism did not exist. To be a member or officer in one of the largest and oldest American Protestant denominations was to be an evangelical. One way to illustrate this point is to look at the sort of statements issued in 1908 at the founding of the Federal Council of Churches. This body, of course, is rarely considered one of the institutions or... Read more
Once more a defense of evangelicalism by trying to disassociate this form of Protestantism from Donald Trump and the surveys of Americans that in 2016 find eighty-one percent of evangelical Protestants voted for the president: What does it mean to be evangelical? The simple answer is that evangelical Christianity is the religion of born-again Christians. Here’s a little more detailed definition: evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship... Read more
Josh Zeitz explains (did so even before Hillary versus Donald): The president did it again. Governing unapologetically by executive fiat, he steamrolled over Congress and issued a sweeping order that was sure to raise the ire of his Republican opponents. Their complaint was as familiar as his offense. Big, potentially divisive challenges should be resolved through a deliberative, bipartisan legislative process, Republicans insisted, and not by diktat. “If the change has any merit at all,” groused a certain former GOP... Read more
Something odd happened on social media. Beth Moore tweeted this: https://twitter.com/BethMooreLPM/status/1198272282638082048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Apparently, she did not realize that she was channeling another Baptist, one from yesteryear. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a prominent modernist, preached something similar in his famous sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In the evangelical churches today there are differing views of this matter. One view is that Christ is literally coming, externally, on the clouds of heaven, to set up His kingdom here. I never heard that teaching in... Read more
What if evangelicalism only began in the 1940s with the fame Billy Graham acquired, which observers in turn translated into a religious movement? The theological critiques and historical soul searching of the 1990s raised important questions about how to fix evangelicalism. For some like Wells the solution resides in more and better doctrine. For others like Noll evangelicalism needs to abandon restrictive and simplistic theological formulas. Greater zeal and faithfulness, along with greater discernment about evangelicalism’s recent past are also... Read more
Putting the Protest in Protestant
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