However, this also was a weakness of the book: the theme of treasuring Christ became the overarching lens to interpret these three topics in Scripture.  While on the one hand it is true we must treasure Christ above all; on the other hand there are many more dimensions in Scripture about these things.  Having a... Continue Reading

“Affirming” vs. “Non-Affirming” – Related to the above, I am persuaded that the labels “affirming” and “non-affirming” frame the issue in a way that is already biased against what the church has always believed about homosexuality. When the labels are applied to questions of human identity, they sound as if one group likes gay people... Continue Reading

“The answer, according to Enns, is that Christians (still) have a problem with certainty, despite the numerous treatments that have said as much. Specifically, he thinks we’ve identified our faith in God with our thoughts about God, and so have become preoccupied with correct thinking.”   “I’m not saying never doubt or question,” John Ames writes to his... Continue Reading

“The pastor need not be surprised if he finds troublers in his church. The discovery of such persons among the professed people of God sometimes shocks ministers, especially inexperienced ones, and discourages them, and sometimes leads them unwisely to give up their charges. But it should be understood as a lamentable fact that such persons... Continue Reading

This book is quite well done, carefully argued, and theologically perceptive. I thought, over the course of some 350 blog posts, and countless comments, that I had considered the FV from just about every possible angle. Dewey showed me wrong. He has many angles that I had not thought of before. If the peacefully slumbering... Continue Reading

What are the main themes in the creation account? Authority? Leadership? Equality? Are these the words that most correspond to our sexual design and our relationships in marriage and the church? Lee-Barnewall challenges the way we read into the Genesis account with our own arguments by asking the reader to look at it in a... Continue Reading

Backsliding is a hard part of the Christian life, and we should not like it, but it shouldn’t cause us to despair or think we’re not saved because we are backsliding.  God’s people have gone through this trial before and we’ll go through it again.  Of course, it is also wise to seek to avoid... Continue Reading

“I recently came across an extended quote from Denis Alexander’s book Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? In this excerpt he helps readers understand the incredible amount of time encompassed by an evolutionary framework. But the deeper he goes into his argument, the farther he seems to go from the centrality of man in... Continue Reading

“The source of this Internet frenzy is Barton Swaim’s recent critique (“Stott Bowdlerized,” First Things, May 2016, 17–19) of the third edition of Basic Christianity, published eight years ago in 2008. Upon discovering that the reviser had altered the first sentence of the preface “stupidly,” Swaim undertook a line-by-line comparison with the old edition.”  ... Continue Reading

In American evangelicalism it has become commonplace to hear of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. 1945) as a heroic, patriotic evangelical fighting liberalism and Nazi extremism.  Bonhoeffer was a brilliant and brave pastor-theologian who rightly stood against many evils in Nazi Germany, but he wasn’t a conservative evangelical.  We can learn many things from him, but we... Continue Reading