Quote of the Day – June 23
From Dave Black Online, Rhino Evangelism:
What a tragedy that some Christians, while having a commendable zeal for evangelism, also display the sweet approachability of a rhinoceros!
From Dave Black Online, Rhino Evangelism:
What a tragedy that some Christians, while having a commendable zeal for evangelism, also display the sweet approachability of a rhinoceros!
I already responded to one post by Michael Patton on this topic (Am I a Complementarian?), but he followed this up with a question. I have been so busy with the release of my latest book (co-authored with Geoffrey Lentz) that I have fallen well behind the progress of this topic, but I still want…
I have somewhat of a tradition of reflecting somewhere on my blogs about books I am about to publish. So today I want to look at Allan R. Bevere’s new book The Character of Our Discontent. Allan is a primarily New Testament trained preacher who has decided to take on some major passages in the…
In my book When People Speak for God, I discuss testing messages that people claim are from God. There is a passage in Deuteronomy 18:21-22 that is commonly used in connection with this. In that passage the message is tested by whether the word from God comes to pass. There are some interesting questions this…
One thing second or third year Greek students notice, at least those who manage to start actually reading the Greek New Testament, is that various books have different levels of Greek grammar and vocabulary, and different literary styles. There’s a reason why most early reading exercises from the New Testament are from John or Mark….
In the introduction to his book What’s God Really Like? S. J. Hill tells the story of a student who announced at the end of a term in a class he taught, that she had discovered that God was cool. I don’t know how you react to that, but the moment I read that line…
I work on a heavy schedule, and as someone who is self-employed, with two distinct lines of business, I very rarely see a blank to-do list. In fact, now that I think about it, it has been several years since I finished a day and could say I was done. I identify a couple of…
Actually I’d disagree. Of the Christian evangelists I’ve met, the only one whose company I didn’t particularly enjoy was one who had clearly given up on me as a lost cause.
I was in a park and a couple of really nice evangelists came over and started chatting. The conversation started to get beyond the limits of their knowledge, particularly on evolution/creationism, so they called over their apologist-in-chief.
This guy was clearly not interested in discussion, having (correctly?) pegged me as a lost cause, so was only debating to retain face with the junior evangelists. He clearly wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. The conversation degenerated into a bizarre speed-chess version of the God debate, with points and counter-points bouncing backwards and forwards at a rate of about one every ten seconds.
It ended when the apologist-in-chief pulled the Just Pray About It exit manoeuvre and scarpered. I can only hope his associates found the experience as weird and bemusing as I did.
(The punchline was that later that day I actually did try praying, just in case. The only thing I got was a splitting headache. Thanks, God.)