A recent Associate Press article out of North Carolina reported on wild fires that burned homes and churches.  My local newspaper published a “box” highlighting the following quote by a member of a church that burned: “There is nothing that happens that God does not intend to happen.” I went to the internet attempting to discover if the church is Reformed and was unable to establish that.  However, I have reason to doubt it.  The church SEEMS to be African-American... Read more

Today is Good Friday and an appropriate time to return to a theme I’ve dealt with before here–the gradual disappearance of the cross in American Christianity (including among evangelicals). I can understand theologically liberal Protestants wanting to downplay the cross as it is offensive to modern sensibilities and liberal theology is “maximal acknowledgment of the claims of modernity.”  The cross, properly, biblically understood and not reduced to a martyrdom, is scandalous.  But it is a scandal central to the gospel... Read more

It seems to me some who have responded to my earlier post regarding capital punishment as slavery have overlooked the parallel with slavery.  The logic goes: the Bible supports capital punishment, so we must support capital punishment.  The same logic was used by supporters of slavery during the abolition debates in Great Britain and America in the late 18th and first half of the 19th centuries.  We now all (hopefully!) agree that slavery is a sin.  But the Bible most... Read more

Some time ago I wrote here about two important theological decisions the Bible does not help us solve.  The first one was nominalism/voluntarism versus realism (with regard to whether God has a nature) and the second one was whether the church of the New Testament was the church in embryo or the mature church.  Where a person comes down on these issues inevitably influences much of his or her theology, but the Bible does not directly (or perhaps even indirectly)... Read more

A controversy is raging over capital punishment in Texas–a state that executes upwards of 30 to 35 people (almost all men and disproportionately African-American and poor) annually.  Most Texas Christians favor capital punishment even though it has been shown repeatedly not to be a deterrant to crime.  Life in prison serves just as well for that. In 1991 a house fire killed three children in a small Texas town.  The father, Cameron Todd Willingham, by most accounts not a particularly... Read more

I have a close acquaintance who belongs to an Evangelical Free Church in the Midwest that is currently showing a video series about the “Christian worldview.”  My acquaintance is attending each showing of the film series and taking notes and doing his best to absorb it while thinking critically about it at the same time. I have not seen this series and I doubt that I have time to watch it all.  But I have been hearing more and more about... Read more

Two diseases of disposition seem to infect and derail many good theological discussions: hardening of the categories and theological absolutism. So many theological discussions become unnecessarily heated by failure to recognize that many of our dearest theological categories cannot be precisely pinned down.  People assume a particular definition of, say “inclusivism,” and disallow anyone from thinking of it differently than they do.  I’ve been reading in that subjective widely and deeply for years and find that there is no one, universally... Read more

I’ve begun reading a relatively new book (2010) by one Steven B. Sherman entitled Revitalizing Theological Epistemology: Holistic Approaches to the Knowledge of God (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co.). The author begins with my category “postconservative evangelical” and defines it thus: “Basically, they [postconservative evangelicals] compose a loose coalition of thinkers who are seeking to facilitate a number of ‘beyond’ moves, theologically: beyond the agenda of the modernist/fundamentalist dichotomy toward what they see as a more holistic theology; beyond... Read more

Over the past several years more Protestant theologians have been protesting what has traditionally been considered the formal principle of Protestantism–sola scriptura. Insofar as I understand him correctly, Gerald McDermott criticizes me for upholding it in his article about evangelicals in First Things (about which I posted here recently).  Yesterday (April 9) I heard evangelical historian par excellence Mark Noll talk about it. Noll is hardly the only evangelical Protestant raising questions about the viability of sola scriptura.  I’m only... Read more

I already know that some people who read what I am going to write here will claim I’m a univeralist.  But that will be based on their attempt to read my “real thoughts” (as they attempt to do with Rob Bell) contrary to what I specifically say.  I am not a universalist.  Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. HOWEVER…What I would like to ask people who get so worked up about universalism is this: What difference would it make... Read more