Piety

Our Embarrassment of Translational Riches

We have an embarrassment of riches in our English Bible translations. Today I was texting a particular man whom my church's outreach ministries have had a lot of contact with over the last few years. The last time I spoke with him he was in a very bad situation, and...

Worldview and Sexuality: Ideas Have Consequences

View image | gettyimages.com Jennifer Roback Morse, in an excellent article on the Sexual Revolution: The modern world is living out the Revolutionary view of sexuality and of the cosmos. We act as if we believe that we are alone in a meaningless and indifferent...

Three Good Reasons to Resist Making Relativism Our Latest Bogeyman

Merold Westphal on hermeneutics and relativism: We are easily frightened by the specter of "anything goes," and there is no shortage of those willing to play on this fear in order to imply their own absoluteness. But there are three good reasons to resist this fear:...

Most Popular Bible Verses by Country

YouVersion tells us that these are the most popular Bible verses by country: I feel guilty for complaining about people's choice of Bible verses... But not so guilty that I'll stop yet. You may guess, as I did, what people are looking to these verses to do. Listen to...

A Little Internet Wisdom

So true, from a CT movie reviewer: The trick to writing on the Internet and getting heard is making a very loud, very extreme argument. The Internet does not reward nuanced takes or people who wait a week and a half to think something through, and the...

Harm, Consent, and Fifty Shades of Sexual Liberation

Why I can't help but read Doug Wilson, writing on Fifty Shades of Grey: If you create a world defined by the excitement of breaking taboos, then how is an insistence upon "mutual agreement" anything but the creation of the final taboo? Secular moral philosopher...

Two Reasons Honorary Religious Doctorates Are (Often) Bad

I find it sad and discreditable that certain crowds of Christians, we fundamental Baptists prominent among them, hand out honorary doctorates so freely. (Charismatics do it, too.) I would rather go to a Bible college with a faculty full of "Reverends" than one full of...

The Declaration of Independence Proves to Be An Illusion

Satan led humankind into covenant disobedience. He tempted humankind to reject the rule of Yahweh and to issue their "declaration of independence" from their Creator. The consequences are devastating. When communion with the Creator of life is broken, death inevitably...

Pure Pleasure in Being Praised

I have small children, and I think of this all the time: No one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either,...

You Just Have to Read This

I posted on this some time ago, but I have thought of it so often that I have to post it again: Wheaton prof Timothy Larsen's thoughts on why so many Christians feel that the teaching they received as children was simplistic. Very insightful, penetrating. A must-read...

A Grace Story

David and Stephanie Heimann are valued friends to my wife and me, they are colaborers in ministry, and they are both objects of God's amazing grace. They were recently baptized after coming to understand over time that their initial professions of faith were not...

Is Every Sin Equally Heinous?

Is every sin equal in the eyes of God? John Frame answers in his new systematic—with just the kind of simple, straightforward, biblical reasoning I've come to expect from him: It might seem that since all sin is of the heart, every sin is equally heinous. But...