Working Class People and the Evangelical Conversation
There are other major, often unreached for the Gospel demographics that are maybe not as prestigious but no less spiritually important and in some cases far more numerous. A gun-owning middle aged white man in West Virginia or central Pennsylvania who’s a truck driver or living on disability is not a major part of the Evangelical conversation. A near retirement age housewife who works part-time at Wal-Mart in a small Midwestern city is typically not part of the conversation. A Millennial age...
I’m with Pinker
I critiqued Steven Pinker several times in Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption; Pinker is an epistemological extremist, in my unaccredited opinion, someone who places far too much faith in empirical method. But I can't help but like the guy when he talks about the English language—and when he talks: he's got a precise, Canadian-inflected way of speaking that I like. (I would like him better if he let me on the AHD usage panel, but ah well...) And he understands that the "rules" of...
Complementarian and Egalitarian Straw Persons
I recently ran across the the master's thesis of an ardent evangelical egalitarian, written at Regent University Divinity School (Virginia Beach) in 2010. You can Google it if you want to, but I don't want to pick on the (female) author in particular, so I'll leave her name out of it. It opens this way: INTRODCTION [sic] The argument has grown tiresome, redundant, and frustrating: should women be allowed to hold leadership roles over men in the Christian Church? Many Christian leaders and...
Bible Editions are Tools
A highly respected and faithful friend of mine heard me deliver this lecture on "Why Bible Typography Matters", which aimed at getting people to read "reader's editions" of the Bible, printings with no verse or chapter numbers. The presentation also included a call for future help: "Would you," I asked the congregation, "let me know how it goes if you try reader's editions?" This highly respected and faithful friend of mine was the only person out of my 500 or so hearers to really do this....
Review: Christianity and Liberalism
Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen My rating: 4 of 5 stars I apologize to the internet for not giving this classic five stars, but it simply didn't quite reach the level of incisiveness and helpfulness for me in my situation that Packer's analysis in "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God reached. It was, nonetheless, excellent. It was sad to see that we are facing some of the very same issues today, and in exactly the same way, that he faced in the early 20th century. This could...