Is It Time for American Christians to Bow out of the Culture Wars? Part 2 If you did not read Part 1 (the immediately preceding post) please do that before reading this one. This “Part 2” builds on Part 1 and assumes its content. The question on the “table” is whether Christians in America and other post-Christian societies ought to abandon attempts to manipulate the “levers of power” (legislation) for specifically Christian or specifically religious moral ideals. Using an old… Read more

Is It Time for American Christians to Bow out of the Culture Wars? Part 1 First, what do I mean by “the culture wars?” Well, of course, in the broadest sense there have always been culture wars. Anyone who knows anything about American history knows it. There have always been struggles between different religious and political groups over public and private morality, what is shameful, sinful, what should be legal, illegal, etc. One of the “biggest” was the “war” over… Read more

Idolatry on a Billboard? For some time now I have been warning anyone who will listen that many American Christians are in grave danger of committing the same extreme error that “German Christians” made in the 1930s when they put Hitler and the National Socialist Party on a pedestal and treated him as a new messiah and it as a new revelation of God to save the German people. That is, they included Hitler and the Nazi Party within what… Read more

Can a Calvinist Honestly Say “God Loves You” to Everyone? Recently a leading American Calvinist pastor-theologian has asked and answered this all-important question on his blog: Can a Calvinist (and he means himself and those who agree with him) honestly say “God loves you” to everyone and anyone? I have answered this question in Against Calvinism (Zondervan) and here, on my blog, before. But I’ll go at it again—for those who haven’t read what I have said about it before… Read more

Is “Calminianism” Really a Thing?   Recently I received in the mail a pre-publication copy of an article that will appear in the forthcoming Mixed Blessings: The Dictionary of Blended Religion by author Tim Stewart. (When it is published I will announce that here. In the meantime you can follow its progress toward publication at http://www.mixedblessingsdictionary.com .) The article I received is entitled “Calminian” and the first paragraph is as follows: “A Christian who affirms a combination of Calvinist and… Read more

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us” Thoughts about American “Evangelicals” The famous saying “We have met the enemy and he is us” was created by cartoon strip writer Walt Kelly in 1970. (He repeated it in 1971.) Kelly’s cartoon strip in the Sunday “comics” section of newspapers was called “Pogo.” The phrase was a paraphrase of a famous military commander who, during the War of 1812, declared “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” From… Read more

“The Climb” Guest Post by Asahel Adams *This is a sermon heard at a Christian wedding in 2015. The preacher is an elder at an independent Christian church. I thought it was worth sharing with my readers. (Note to would-be commenters: Do not even attempt to expose anything about the author-preacher; he will not be here to respond. I do not know him personally. There were about one thousand people at this wedding ceremony. I asked a friend of the… Read more

What Can Be “The Bible?” A question has come to me and the questioner has asked that I addressed it on my blog. I am happy to try. Here is the question: Can “the Bible” only be a book, a physical object (parchment or pages with words) or can “the Bible” be truly and authentically “there” in some other form? This question has arisen recently especially in conservative Protestant churches (fundamentalist and evangelical especially) as a result of the reality… Read more

Who Is an “Evangelical” and Who Gets to Decide? This question (or two) has been discussed almost to death over my adult lifetime among evangelicals. Many years ago I began to attend a then relatively new “society” of evangelical scholars that met annually. I remember three annual meetings during which panelists and members of the audience talked about who is an evangelical and who gets to decide. No consensus emerged. It was frustrating. In the last moment of the third… Read more

The Prophethood of Every Believer “Prophecy” means many different things to different people. Here I mean by “prophet” someone who speaks God’s truth to God’s people and to people with power. Often this includes making people uncomfortable by pointing out their sins—personal and social. The Bible describes certain people as called by God to be prophets and to prophecy. From the earliest extra-biblical writings we know there were prophets among late first century and early second century Christians especially in… Read more