Of Virgin Births and Whale’s Bellies

Allan Bevere asks an interesting question today on his blog: Just how important is the doctrine of the virgin birth to you? He titles the post Must One Believe in the Virgin Birth to Be a Christian?

I tend to annoy people on both sides of the spectrum (belief in miracles spectrum, of course) [...]

Common Ground on Genesis

On the Spectrum blog there’s quite a lot of discussion of the age of the earth and a search for common ground. The problem with the phrase “common ground” is that it can mean many different things. Two recent articles on the age of the earth had quotes that caught my attention. As far [...]

On Inerrancy Again

My previous post refers to Preserving Democracy, written by my friend Elgin Hushbeck, Jr., but doesn’t actually mention that we have been friends for some time. I say this because I’m about to take his name in vain (sort of). We’ve been friends since the mid-90s when we met on the Religion Forum on [...]

Adrian Warnock on the Doctrine of Scripture

And as you might expect, I’m disagreeing with him. In introducing a post urging people to read Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology (not a bad idea), he says:

There is no more foundational subject than the doctrine of Scripture. All the current theological arguments that are causing such disruption in the Church today stem [...]

BioLogos and Reasons to Believe in Dialogue

While I am much more in support of the approach of BioLogos than Reasons to Believe, I’m glad to see that they are discussing. Perhaps laying out the details of each group’s approach may help Christians understand the issues more clearly.

I see very little future, however, for the day-age theory, despite its strong [...]

Scot McKnight on Walton on Genesis 1

Scot McKnight has started an 18 part discussion of John Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. Even though I have not yet read Dr. Walton’s book, I can tell you that this is a very important discussion for Christians and that I expect much value just [...]

Interpreting the Bible VIII: Biblical Literalism, Attitude, and Avoidance

This is a continuation of my series on interpreting the Bible. The first post in the series is Interpreting the Bible I: Obvious Exegesis, while the most recent one was Interpreting the Bible VII: Christians Contribute to Confusion.

As a reminder, my starting point was a number of comments that suggested that those who [...]

Borrowing and Inspiration

I want to discuss inspiration just a bit, partly because it is relevant to my next post on Biblical interpretation (I hope to post it later today), and partly because there is someone on Twitter who is spouting a great deal of nonsense with regard to parallels and borrowing.

(For those interested, he is [...]

Best Sermon on the Bible

… that I’ve heard, at least, and in my opinion!

It’s by Dr. Wesley Wachob. Let me give you the link first: The Strange New World within the Bible. Those of you who are acquainted with Karl Barth will recognize the title. (You can subscribe to the First UMC Pensacola podcast here, or via [...]

Interpreting the Bible – Mid-Course Focus

This isn’t a summary of previous posts, but rather an attempt to focus on the issue I’m trying to address with this series before I continue. The problem with a series like this is that the examples begin to take over the topic. Since I have used complementarianism and theistic evolution as examples, and [...]