One of the most important lectures I’ve ever heard:
WHAT IS THE KINGDOM?
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Category Archives: Bible
CONFIDENCE IN GOD
NT WRIGHT ON LANGUAGE AND HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE
I have not heard this particular argument against homosexual marriage, but it makes a lot of sense. And if you think that N.T. Wright is some conservative firebrand, he is hardly in that category.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKxvOMOmHeI
(HT: Justin Taylor)
AMERICANS AND THE BIBLE
Interesting: http://www.religionnews.com/2014/06/05/decline-literalism-rise-secularism-one-chart/
(HT: Jonathan Merritt)
WHEN BIBLICAL LANGUAGE WAS WELL KNOWN
I first heard this story in seminary. In case you haven’t:
http://robertbsloan.com/2013/03/11/but-if-not-the-miracle-of-dunkirk/
PASTOR TURNED SKEPTIC
A short time ago I read an article about a former pastor who became a skeptic. The post 9/11 world did not make sense to him. He figured there could be no God in such a world. This kind of struggle of course is nothing new.
Andrew Delbanco has famously said Americans went from believing in the providence of God prior to the Civil War to believing in luck after it. Too much carnage took place for one to keep believing in a God who is both good and in control of all things.
I also struggle to make sense of these realities, yet I am perplexed by those who choose to bail on the Christian faith.
The Bible makes it clear that we are living in a broken world where the most hideous things imaginable will take place. Make sure to digest that important truth. If “delicate women” will boil their own children for food (see Deut. 28:53-57), we know there is the capacity for all kinds of evil.
Further, if God had not made it clear that I will not understand many things this side of heaven, I also would consider bailing on the Christian faith. However, God has made it clear we will only know in very small part. There is quite a bit in Scripture on this truth (for example Deut. 29:29; Job 38-42; Isa. 55:8,9; I Cor. 13:12)
Luther, like the Psalmists (note plural) struggled with the silence of God, even the God who seems to hide Himself at times. We should be glad for the candor of Scripture, but also chastened to remember we only now see in a “mirror dimly.”
So I wonder what Bible the pastor who bailed was reading.
JOB’S COUNSELORS
I was wondering about this recently:
If Job’s counselors were probably more mature than the majority of Christians today, what does that mean about the advice we regularly receive from others?
LIVING FOR WHAT MATTERS
It may not be as radical as what these folks did.
Then again, it may.
Whatever it is, make sure you don’t settle for simply having the America Dream. That dream is much, much too small.
PENTECOST…THE PROFESSOR
Dwight Pentecost was nearing seventy years old when I had him as a professor in the early 1980s. And he kept teaching and teaching at Dallas Seminary, all the way into his late nineties. He recently went to be with the Lord having just passed his ninety-ninth birthday!
There are many distinct things I recall about Dr. P (his nickname). There was his humor. There was his genuine care for students which I experienced firsthand. And there was his reverence for God’s Word. He taught us through it line by line with no notes, except those that were already in his Bible.
A tribute page from Dallas Seminary:
IS JESUS GOD?
The man in the picture is biblical scholar and agnostic, Bart Ehrman. His story of leaving the Christian faith is well-known. His books are widely read and vigorously debated.
In my own correspondence with Ehrman I found him quite candid about doubt. He admitted that how one chooses to look at the evidence for the Bible’s reliability greatly influences what conclusion one comes to. For one scholar who came to a wholly different conclusion than Ehrman: