The Apostle Paul's brilliance as a rhetorician shines in the early verses of his Epistle to the Romans. Three times he ties the downward spiral of human sin to the refusal to acknowledge the natural revelation of God's existence and work: "For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give […]
There is a dreadful ditch in Christianity, a wedge between propositional truth and personal practice. Kevin Vanhoozer calls it “a debilitating dichotomy between theory and practice.” (1) Although we probably should not reduce this dichotomy to a battle between modern or postmodern Christians, it is helpful to see how each approaches doctrine, or for our […]
The last two years have been good for atheism. A rash of books making the case for unbelief, including Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006) and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), have sold millions of copies. Strident atheist Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, one of his atheistic tomes designed […]
Denial of the existence of God-or atheism-is by no means novel. There were atheists as far back as the first millennia b.c. King David referred to such people who, despite the manifest evidence in creation, acted like and even convinced themselves that there was no God as outright fools (Pss. 8:3, 10:4, 14:1). The Greeks […]
Christianity fell out of intellectual favor during the Enlightenment in large part because Rationalist and Empiricist critics charged it with being incompatible with all reason and evidence. At the time, sadly, the church as a whole did less than a stellar job of responding to such charges. But a funny thing happened on the way […]
The current virulent strain of evangelical atheism does a disservice to many of the arguments of traditional atheism. I am thinking here of the latest efforts by the new Apostles of Atheism, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). […]
The bright young student in the first row looked up at me with surprise: "C. S. Lewis was an atheist?" Several undergraduates in the class nodded and audibly confirmed my statement. "I had no idea," he muttered wide-eyed as he jotted down some notes. Indeed, C. S. Lewis ("Jack" to his friends) considered himself an […]
"What do you think of Van Tillian presuppositionalism?" asked the earnest young man in a Starbucks café situated in the Borders store in Leeds, England. Not exactly the question I was expecting at an outreach event discussing atheism. "It's okay," I replied, "as long as you don't take it too seriously." Wrong answer. The next […]
Several years ago, a mainline theologian told me of his experience at an evangelical megachurch. He was visiting his children and grandchildren during spring break and then Easter Sunday arrived. Nothing visibly suggested that it was a Christian service, but this distinguished theologian tried to reign in his judgments. There was no greeting from God […]
The Pelagian tendency of popular Christianity in our day-which Christian Smith called "moralistic, therapeutic deism"-can be further substantiated by the studies of sociologist Marsha Witten. In All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism, Witten revealed her results from studying the texts of 47 sermons on the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), […]
We have the great privilege of interviewing Richard Bauckham to talk about his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006). First of all, can we really get to first-century events through the documents that we have? In my book I argue that the Gospels are very close to the way […]
Thirty-five years since the publication of Sydney Ahlstrom's award-winning (and shelf-bending) A Religious History of the American People, which persuasively suggested that Puritanism is the leitmotif of America's religious history, George McKenna has upped the ante. In fewer pages, but with no less persuasive force, he builds the case for reading not only the country's […]
Eric R. Severson has collected for his readers 29 different authors' treatments of the sheep and goats parable from Matthew 25. These range from Saint Irenaeus in the second century to George Whitefield in the eighteenth. Each selection is followed by "reading questions" and bibliography. Sometimes the sheep and goats passage is central and sometimes […]
No one who has read the current archbishop of Canter-bury's magisterial work, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, can be in any doubt about his ability to operate with ease at the highest levels of scholarship and to write prose as sophisticated and dense as its subject matter. It is thus something of a delight to discover […]
In the 1971 festschrift dedicated to Cornelius Van Til, Jerusalem and Athens, G. C. Berkouwer complained that Van Til had supplied little biblical exegesis to establish his apologetic approach. Van Til, granting his point, regretted it and pointed to the excellent endeavors of his colleagues on the faculty of Westminster Theological Sem-inary in Philadelphia as […]
