What is Your Position on Complementarianism and Egalitarianism?
A female professor of Christian ministry just sent me a survey to fill out. I don't consider myself an expert in this area, but I certainly have tried to be responsible—this is one of those places where the battle over truth is fiercest in my generation. Here were my answers. What is your position on complementarianism and egalitarianism? Strongly complementarian ✔Moderately complementarianModerately egalitarianStrongly egalitarianNeither complementarian nor egalitarian Briefly explain the...
Mark Driscoll Makes It into the OED
Look who I discovered being cited in the august OED… I wish I knew more about the work of OED lexicographers, my heroes. I don't know, for example, how OED editors find/choose their citation sources. It's just that beyond Shakespeare and various editions of the Bible, most of their citations are so obscure—so old (obviously) or so far from my ken—that it was a pleasant shock to see a current book from my evangelical world. I've come to really trust the OED after tons and tons of use. It isn't...
Does “By Faith We Understand” (Heb 11:3) Have It Backwards?
A Christian friend who struggles with doubt recently wrote me asking why I chose the name of long-time blog, byfaithweunderstand.com. Today I was thinking again about those four words “by faith we understand” and I feel a physical reaction to it. It’s hard to swallow because it’s still counter-intuitive to my analytical/scientific mind if it means what I think it means. In science, we tend towards inductive reasoning, gathering facts and then making a conclusion. But these four words seem to...
Home Studio Tour and Videography Kit
Updated 03/03/2021 Several friends have asked, so here’s a tour of my home video studio—which I set up for the second season of the Bible Study Magazine Podcast and for my own YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/TtVBIof3Olo Updated shot of my studio (3/3/21): And this is my current video kit: Canon M50, body only - This is widely regarded as one of the best entry-level vlogging cameras. I'm thoroughly happy with it. Literally my only wish is that the remote could trigger manual focus. Update...
Christianity and Liberalism and Homosexuality
J.I. Packer’s first book, “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, published when he was 32 years old in 1958, provides a brilliantly simple analysis of the three major approaches to Christian religious authority that were then, as now, on offer. Briefly, they were…. 1) Evangelicalism: Scripture is the final authority 2) Traditionalism: church tradition is the final authority 3) Subjectivism: autonomous human reason is the final authority I take Packer’s evangelical viewpoint: though I value...