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Same sex marriage: the argument from inevitability
Read more: Same sex marriage: the argument from inevitabilityAlex Lundry, Mitt Romney’s data analyst, recently reported that over 60% of evangelical youth support the legalization of same sex marriage (SSM). This number is in stark contrast to the responses of older evangelical Christians to poll on the issue. Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen cited this statistic on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday. The…
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Objections to the Trinity
Read more: Objections to the TrinityHere in Sydney I’m currently co-teaching a seminary class on the doctrine of the Trinity. We’ve spent the first few weeks of the course reading and discussing some sermons by Gregory of Nazianzus. The next section will focus on parts of Augustine’s De Trinitate. In the final third of the semester we’ll work through §59 of Karl…
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Christianity Today? Redeeming Evangelical Relevancy
Read more: Christianity Today? Redeeming Evangelical RelevancyThis week Christianity Today ran a short article commemorating the 100th birthday of its deceased founder, Carl F.H. Henry. Henry is worthy of memory; aside from the aforementioned magazine, he gave us Fuller Theological Seminary and he was a key signatory on the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy. He was passionately engaged in both doctrine and…
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St. Augustine’s Institute for Biblical Hermeneutics (Part I)
Read more: St. Augustine’s Institute for Biblical Hermeneutics (Part I)The Bible bursts the bonds of our hermeneutical strategies. The Scriptures as the medium of divine communication are what Karl Barth called a “free Bible”. This is good news: the canon imposes itself upon us readers, transgressing the procrustean bed we inevitably bring to the table as interpreters. For Barth this fact necessitates the development…
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The Albatross of Inerrancy?
Read more: The Albatross of Inerrancy?Many evangelical churches’ and colleges’ professions of faith contain a statement on the inerrancy of the Bible. The Bible, so it goes, is inspired by God and is inerrant in the original manuscripts. This belief certainly has its staunch–and I mean staunch!–proponents, but it seems to me that a great many people are, frankly, embarrassed…
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Prayer as Ethics
Read more: Prayer as Ethics“…you become better and better by looking for so great a good which is both sought in order to be found and found in order to be sought…” -St. Augustine “Ethics” means more than understanding how one should act in a certain situation in order to be free from blame. This type of ethics is…
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What Does “Biblical” Mean?
Read more: What Does “Biblical” Mean?Yesterday, Richard Beck of Experimental Theology wrote a post on what the word “biblical” means. As will be obvious, I don’t much care for what he had to say. In fact, it made me so grumpy that I thought I’d respond. I hope he takes it as a compliment. In his piece he concludes: Biblical is…
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Philosophy in the Bible
Read more: Philosophy in the BibleEarlier this year I submitted the following entry for The Lexham Bible Dictionary. This will be the entry for “Philosophy”. It’s obviously too late to change it for the dictionary, but let me know what you think anyways! (I like it alright, but the quote from Kierkegaard and the use of Kelsey make it a…
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“Karl Barth is Evil”: The Strong and the Weak
Read more: “Karl Barth is Evil”: The Strong and the WeakIn the undergraduate class I am teaching this semester, one of the research assignments students can choose is an analysis of the Barth and Bultmann debate over the nature of Jesus’ resurrection. One student who chose this assignment later changed their mind; this person sent me an email asking if it would be possible change…
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Why Theology Sucks
Read more: Why Theology SucksI recently had a pastor tell me that the in-depth, formal study of what is commonly called “systematic theology” would be a waste of my time and would not have a real benefit for the church. When I tried to engage yet another pastor in discussion about theology he remarked flatly, “theology is boring.” Both…