While I was off teaching Revelation elsewhere, my Sunday School class at First United Methodist Church of Pensacola studied from Harvey Brown’s new book Forgiveness: Finding Freedom from Your Past. Harvey’s book is just 40 pages (it’s in our Topical Line Drives series, and that’s the limit), and we discovered just how many questions can…
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) because…
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 as…
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 Compuserve….
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 from a…
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 acceptance…
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 from…
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 take…
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 @BibleAlsoSays,…
… 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 iTunes.)…
