Check Out The Artistic Theologian, a new journal put together in part by my friend Scott Aniol and, in its first issue, featuring articles by Scott, Kevin Bauder, and T. David Gordon. I was given the opportunity to submit a review to its inaugural volume.
ChurchLife
Review: Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission
Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission by Tim Chester My rating: 4 of 5 stars The times they are a changin’. If America ever was a Christian nation, it certainly isn’t one now. It would do us good, therefore, to listen to conservative Christians whose nation...
Frame on Churches in Politics
[One] danger [for politically active churches], of course, is that churches will get so caught up in political activism that they lose sight of Christ. The solution is not to avoid political issues, but to see politics as [Abraham] Kuyper did, as an opportunity to...
A Fundamentalism Worth Saving
It's time to resurrect a favorite essay of mine, Kevin Bauder's "A Fundamentalism Worth Saving." I read this thing multiple times on my Palm IIIxe back in the mid 2000s, and I noticed recently that it was languishing in an ugly format on the AACCS site. So I have...
Instagram vs. Kodak
I’m not a business guy. I’m a blogger. A purveyor of amateur opinions. But now that I’ve worked in a business for six years, I’ve come to recognize that some business savvy is required to get things done—even and especially if you hold none of the purse strings. (I...
Review: Charles Hodge: New Sideold School Presbyterian
Charles Hodge: New Sideold School Presbyterian by Andrew W. Hoffecker My rating: 4 of 5 stars Author Andrew Hoffecker said in an interview that his study of Charles Hodge actually arose from reading about fundamentalism. While Hoffecker was a PhD student at Brown...
New International Reader’s Version and Evangelism
I run a weekly outreach ministry mainly attended by lower-income adults with low educational and reading levels. The KJVs they got who-knows-where are often unintelligible to them, but they seem to truly want to learn and understand. (They listen so much better than...
Stanley Fish on Christian Worldliness
My interpretive community prefers to read this paragraph as a partial but excellent defense of Christian fundamentalism's separation from the world (in the Rom 12:2, 1 John 2:15–17 sense). My interpretive community prefers to read this as a spot-on description of...
Simple Carson Quote
I worry about ministries that focus just on correcting everyone. What I hope to do in all my writing is to promote the truth and proclaim it positively. When we correct, we do it because we think that the glory of God is being diminished. Part of a positive...
Puritans, Fundamentalists, and Evangelicals: A Question of Definition
Here's a great quote from Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible: "A puritan is such a one," the London lawyer John Manningham wrote in 1602, "as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart." Anyone who took a...
Calvinism vs. Arminianism Among Baptists of Two Stripes
I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I work for a non-profit organization (sort of). Plus, I’ve already used that joke before, and it’s not even mine. But I still think what I’m about to predict will come true.Wait for it… Calvinism and Arminianism will...
Perceptive Comment on Worship
We need to ditch the false belief that cultural forms are neutral. Every enculturation of Christianity highlights some elements of the faith and obscures others. We must be vigilant and creatively compensate for what gets lost in translation when we use the language...