The Best Place to Teach the Bible

See You in Bible Class says the MSNBC/Newsweek headline on a story that informs us that the state of Georgia has decided that having a Bible class is a critical part of the public school curriculum for their state. They’re going to mandate that it be added. The story is headed by the picture [...]

Isaiah 24-27 – Overview

Many of the issues of Biblical criticism are illustrated in these four chapters from the book of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah as a whole is fertile ground for such study, but one has to take a reasonable sized bite for an illustration. What I want to do with these chapters is discuss how [...]

Gleason Archer on Daniel

I’ve just run through another commentary on Daniel, in this case the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Volume 7, section on Daniel, by Gleason Archer. (See my notes on this commentary.)

You can review my more detailed view in those notes, but I would simply state that this is one of two carefully conservative, scholarly commentaries [...]

Believing Stuff is not Enough

My early morning reading brought two things together that led me to this post. The first was a blog entry by Shane Raynor on The Wesley Blog, titled What’s Missing from Our Christianity?. In it Shane makes a very important point:

Many of us intellectually believe all the right stuff. Or at least [...]

Creation by Command

In my earlier post on the Biblical Doctrine of Creation, my second element of a Biblical doctrine of creation was that God creates by simple command, in other words, God’s word and will is reality.

This is commonly used as an argument against theistic evolution, and even in some cases against old earth creationism. [...]

Creationist Boilerplate

I was reading the entry The Ignorant Credulity of Creationists on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where Ed Brayton quotes the following from a creationist response to Tiktaalic roseae, and then comments:

. . . or those who are more of a six-day creationist stripe, the finding poses no threat either. [...]

Belshazzar Plays Pretend

Read the story of Belshazzar’s feast in Daniel 5.

The stories of the book of Daniel all have something to do with worship. Often we read them as unconnected stories about Daniel and his friends, but they have a common theme. Daniel 1 shows us the faithfulness of Daniel and his friends to their [...]

Appeal to Numbers and Supposed Authority

When I was in the U. S. Air Force, I had to attend a human relations training program. The instructor was enlisted, but very proudly informed us of his two master’s level degrees. During the course of his presentation he brought up a particular bumper sticker, which happened to be one I had on [...]

Do you know these things?

From the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune: Why is the sky blue? Facts you should know.

The quiz doesn’t provide scoring, but the answers are at the end. Bar that I must say I mentally fudged the amount of water (thinking “about 3/4″ instead of the precise 71%), and the “sky is blue question” when I [...]

Cute Bunny Rabbits, Eggs, and Resurrection

Is there a resurrection in your future? In your near future?

Often concerned Christians complain about the pagan background of Easter, and such practices as Easter eggs, bunny rabbits, and all the signs of spring. Pagan religions in many countries have celebrated spring and the new life that it represents. Fall and spring festivals [...]