OK, it’s Easter Sunday morning, and I can join the chorus: He is risen! But I know from experience that there are Christians out there who are stuck on silent Saturday or Good Friday. For them, Christianity is all–and only–about the cross. Jesus died, they died in Jesus. They had no hope. Jesus is their…
Adrian says it wouldn’t be Easter “without a row about the atonement” and he has promptly located one in a Guardian article by Giles Fraser, in which Fraser says: Thinking about the celebration of Holy Week in my new adopted cathedral brings home to me quite how important it is for Christians to insist upon…
Or you can call him “Reformed.” I personally dislike that particular term because to many people it implies that other protestants never passed through the reformation, that only the Calvinists “reformed.” All of which can also ignore the adjustments in Catholic theology since the time of the reformation. But that’s all a side issue, and…
John Shuck (Shuck and Jive) found this list here, and as I’m teaching a Sunday School class this morning precisely on who will be saved and how, I find it rather interesting. I would suggest that a group has to have something substantial that is both distinctive and held in common to be cohesive and…
Grace is shocking, if you think about it, because by definition someone gets something unearned. But in Calvinism, it seems, grace becomes even more shocking. Adrian Warnock posts a quote from Jonathan Edwards that expresses predestination quite well. You are saved by grace, someone else isn’t. Edwards notes that “although all things are exactly equal…
So far as I know, no, they’re not related. Adrian is concerned with the suggestion that anything in the Bible might be culturally conditioned. Wake up and smell the coffee, Adrian! Practically all of Hebrew scriptures is about leading people from here to there. The narrative is built around the exodus, about physically moving from…
In a recent comment on my video Why I Hate the KJV, I received a comment that began thus: “You were saved by the KJV. . . .” A young man visited my home and discussed with me for more than an hour. At the end, he said he was concerned for my salvation because…
OK, I’m going to try for three short notes at a time. In this case I’m helped by Dave Warnock, who already wrote on the topic. It seems that Adrian Warnock doesn’t like people to be “cool-headed” about the atonement. He says: To be honest, when I heard this book was going to be cool-headed…
Thom Rainer posted an article on Lifeway’s Web Site claiming that pastors who did not preach penal substitutionary atonement (he didn’t use the term, he described the doctrine in very strong terms) are guilty of pastoral malpractice. He used the word “treasonous.” Will, a United Methodist pastor and blogger pleads guilty in that case. I…
I want to briefly point to something that we often miss in Bible study and theology in the western church–corporate identity. We are very individualistic, and that makes it hard to see when some form of corporate identity is in play. This turns up in certain views of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Many…
