Latest Posts
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Fundamentalism and Recent Trends in Evangelicalism
Read more: Fundamentalism and Recent Trends in EvangelicalismWhat is Fundamentalism? Christian fundamentalists (think R.A. Torrey, A.C. Dixon, or recently, John Piper, Norman Geisler, Paul Washer, John MacArthur, Wayne Grudem, etc.) are part of the movement in Evangelicalism that originated in 1910s America. This phrase has been used to connote religious bigotry, abuse, and close-mindedness, but fundamentalists are merely Evangelicals with a complex (we…
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Pushing Past Literalism
Read more: Pushing Past LiteralismEver since I started down the path of academic theology I have been plagued by a single word: “literal”. No other word has caused me near the same amount of frustration and headaches than this word. Not only is it often, ironically, ill defined and vague, it becomes, also ironically, a license to interpret or…
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Extending Grace To Your Church
Read more: Extending Grace To Your ChurchThe ideal church is like delicious, instant coffee. It doesn’t exist. Problems in church are not only realities, they are dead certainties given the fact that all churches unavoidably involve the inconvenience we dislike most — selfish people. We know from St. Paul’s letters that even the first churches were troubled by some serious problems.…
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Three Takeaways from Rehearsing Scripture
Read more: Three Takeaways from Rehearsing ScriptureAnna Carter Florence Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018. Pp. 215, paperback, $16.99 ISBN 9780802874122. In Rehearsing Scripture, Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence (Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary) offers a compelling vision for how the Church can read scripture afresh by adopting it as a script…
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Bearing Fruit
Read more: Bearing FruitIn John 15:1-17, Jesus talks about “bearing fruit” and “friendship.” This is a reflection on the meaning of “bearing fruit” in Scripture, the ways in which John innovates a relationship between fruit, friendship, and death in this passage, and an argument about the counter-intuitive places I think we should look for friendship in Scripture. Bearing…
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Support Indie Filmmaking: “After the Gunflint”
Read more: Support Indie Filmmaking: “After the Gunflint”What is it about films like The Revenant and 127 Hours that grips us so much? One of my buddies (J. D. O’Brien) out here in the Twin Cities is a local filmmaker. His first major film was a documentary called Out in the Cold, which you can check out on Amazon Prime. Out in the Cold looks…
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The Image of God
Read more: The Image of GodWhat is the image of God? As I thought and read about this I came through very interesting concepts that are worth sharing. Let’s start with Paul’s statement of the image of God. Colossians 1:15 states that Jesus is the image of God. Now, Jesus was not simply human, he was fully God and fully…
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The Compound Effect of Showing Up
Read more: The Compound Effect of Showing UpI have been learning about how to improve myself in regards to building habits, setting goals, and achieving goals recently. I just got engaged almost a month ago now and I realized that if I want to be a reliable and competent husband, and just a reliable and competent person in general, then I must…
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Is Your Body the Temple of the Holy Spirit?
Read more: Is Your Body the Temple of the Holy Spirit?I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians concerning the body, the temple, and the Holy Spirit. The primary texts are fairly well-known for Bible readers. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy…