The Adult Bible Studies Sunday School curriculum was on the subject of confession and repentance with the primary passage being Daniel’s prayer in Daniel 9. This is an interesting and powerful prayer to read and deserves more attention than it gets. They secondarily referred to Psalm 51, which is also an important prayer of confession,…
This past Tuesday night I had a conversation about forgiveness (with a long interlude on fiction writing!) with author Nick May. Nick was a last minute stand-in for two guests. My wife Jody was unable to participate because of a sore throat. Renee Crosby, author of the recent release The Fringe, had catastrophic technical difficulties,…
So says Ann Coulter, paraphrasing an accusation made against Brit Hume when he suggested that Tiger Woods should become a Christian: With Christianity, your sins are forgiven, the slate is wiped clean and your eternal life is guaranteed through nothing you did yourself, even though you don’t deserve it. It’s the best deal in the…
I’ve noticed in recent discussions both online and offline that there seems to be some fuzziness about the difference between these two concepts. I think that perhaps our human tendency is to either excuse or condemn. By “excusing” I mean either minimizing a transgression or perhaps even claiming it’s not a transgression at all. When…
Christianity Today has an interesting article on languages of apology (and forgiveness). There are a number of helpful thoughts in this piece that can be helpful. The author, Gary Chapman (The Love Languages of God, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate) relates this to couples, in which I think…
Peter Kirk has been involved in some extended debates about the atonement, and you can read about it here and here. Peter has written some good stuff on understanding the atonement. I have generally just been saying that we must recognize our ways of explaining the atonement as metaphors, and not as the reality. A…
