False Teaching
Evangelicalism is no stranger to controversy. Debates over neo-Orthodoxy, the New Perspective on Paul, and Open Theism—to name only a few in the past half a century—have positioned evangelicals on the right side of controversy as they push back against attempts to abandon or modify major doctrines of the faith. However, recent debate over the […]
Interestingly enough, as liberal theologians reach the end of their careers, they often plunge into a study of Eastern religiosity. Examples include John Hick, D. Z. Phillips, Ninian Smart (some years ago, in 1993, Phillips, Smart, and I were featured speakers on the same university religion panel at the California State University at Fullerton), (1) […]
(PART THREE OF A FOUR-PART SERIES) I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. (1 John 5:13) Although John only disclosed the main purpose of his first letter toward its conclusion, it informed all that he wrote. […]
The year 2016 will almost certainly go down in the annals of church history as the year of the “Great Evangelical Trinitarian Controversy.” A debate, which had brewed for well over a decade through the publication of various books and articles, came to a head through a series of blog posts published in the summer […]
Why are people leaving Reformed churches for Eastern Orthodox churches? While there have always been some who have left Protestant churches to be received (chrismated) into Eastern Orthodoxy (EO), significant cultural differences have generally prevented it from being a significant draw to Protestant “searchers.” With the advent of a distinctly American flavor of EO found […]
Should we take a hammer and chisel to the Jesus of the Bible and shape him into our own personal Jesus? Of course not! This does not, however, stop North Americans from getting out their toolbox. Obviously I’m not speaking literally, but the tendency of people to “rebrand” the Jesus of history into their own […]
Some of you may have been to parts of the United States (such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania) where you have seen a bearded man in plain clothes driving a horse-drawn carriage down paved roads—perhaps with a number of cars behind him moving slowly. He may be moving toward a farm where plows are still pulled by […]
If Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven’s name, is it relevant?—since religious dogma is in fact nothing but a statement of doctrines concerning the nature of life and the universe. If Christian ministers really believe it is only an intellectual game for theologians and has no bearing upon human life, it […]
While most of our attention has been on atheistic critiques of Christianity, another worldview has gained wider acceptance. It’s called panentheism. Unlike pantheism”all is divine’’panentheism means, literally, ‘all is in God.’ In practice, it also can mean ‘God is in all.’ Many thinkers and movements that have been designated ‘pantheist’ throughout the ages have been […]
Panentheism is characteristic of Hinduism (which is polytheistic) and Buddhism, which goes so far as to consider the world an illusion. Neo-Platonist philosophers such as Plotinus believed that a ‘World Soul’ animates the cosmos. Since then, many panentheists have thought of the relationship between God and the world as analogous to that between soul and […]
Given two thousand years of church history, and the large number of TV evangelists, spiritual gurus, and cult leaders running around’all of whom seem bent on conjuring up tailor-made Jesuses to suit their purposes’there are plenty of false Jesuses to for us to consider. We begin by noting that the nature of our Lord’s incarnation […]
Back in 2005, the satirical newspaper The Onion issued one of its better mock headlines, ‘Vatican Gives Popular Jesus Character a Whole New Look.’ According to their sources, ‘the shabby robe-and-sandals look is out, as Vatican makeover artists unveil a new, sleeker son of God featuring a white leather trench coat, short gelled hair, and […]
Of all the doctrines of the Christian faith honored in name and neglected in practice by evangelicals, the Trinity probably has no rival. Ask any evangelical if he believes in the Trinity, and you will almost certainly receive a strongly affirmative answer. Ask what difference the doctrine makes, and you might well be greeted by […]
The doctrine of the Trinity is the highest affirmation the Christian church professes in her teaching and worship of God. The doctrine separates the Christian faith not only from the world’s polytheistic religions, but it likewise makes her worship distinct from the other great “monotheistic” religions of Judaism and Islam. Historically, Christians have refused to […]
"The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology" by Kevin N. Giles
In the introduction to his magisterial Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2004), Lewis Ayres observes that despite the revival of "Trinitarian theology," many theologians have engaged the legacy of Nicaea "at a fairly shallow level, frequently relying on assumptions about Nicene theology that are historically indefensible." If […]
