Truth
“It's official: Truth is dead. Facts are passe.” So declared The Washington Post back in 2016 when they reported on Oxford Dictionary’s decision to select for their international word of the year: “post-truth.” The official definition reads: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. [...]
Although all of God’s revelation sparkles with truth, goodness, and beauty, I often find that certain doctrines give off a peculiar flash. From the beginning, Christians have wondered at the doctrine of glorification from the vantage point of our participation in the Truth and Goodness of Christ. We hear a lot today about “my truth […]
“You shall be like God, knowing good and evil,” the serpent told Eve. Our contemporary culture loves to give us similar advice. Who can be sure what God really said? Better to choose your own identity, express your own personality, construct your own social media profile. Decide what’s right for you, what brings you happiness, […]
Though the battle for “the truth” has raged throughout history, today that battle has shifted significantly, though subtly. The battle is no longer about the truth but about whether there is truth at all. Our times continue to deconstruct how we think we arrive at truth and what we ought to do with truth. The […]
(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. […]
In 2015, a Pew survey on religion was released that confirmed the greatest hopes of some and the greatest fears of others—Christianity is in decline in America.1 Or is it? After digging through the data, Ed Stetzer pointed out that “convictional Christianity” is actually holding steady but “nominal Christianity” is hemorrhaging. The real story, Stetzer […]
Protestant theology and missiology have been experiencing a flood, and it seems to be surging right now. It started trickling back in the 1970s and has been building ever since. It is a flood of books all framed by a single umbrella issue. Let me frame it as a question: “Who are you?” It is […]
As a Jewish person, the first time I heard the gospel was in a Bible study organized by the Navigators at San Diego State University. After sharing some of the Old Testament prophesies, they turned to the Gospel of John, showing how Jesus was the fulfilment of all the prophesies. That was the beginning of […]
In AD 336, a report was circulated that the Egyptian bishop Arsenius had been killed and Athanasius was to blame. The schismatic Meletian party could even produce the corpse’s severed hand as proof. The evidence was persuasive enough that Emperor Constantine was prevailed upon to press a murder charge against the theologian. Fortunately, it turned […]
According to reports, Prince Charles intends—if he ever ascends the British throne—to change his title from “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of Faith.” What’s the loss in dropping a definite article? Everything, actually—the traditional title refers to the defense of a particular confession, a body of doctrine concerning the Triune God who has rescued […]
In his Essays, Civil, and Moral, Sir Francis Bacon wrote that the difficulty with lies is not just that truth requires hard work, or that it (truth) inconveniently imposes itself by obliging us to submit to it, but that we love lies themselves. With a glut of information at our fingertips and “credible sources” for […]
“RELIGION . . . IS THE OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE.”1 Karl Marx’s well-known maxim illustrates a disturbing reality: Too often religion merely makes people feel better about themselves. Some say that religion is no more than a placebo, a deceptively ineffectual medicine, meant to fool the patient into having hope where no real hope exists. […]
In protest of the new president of the United States, TIME magazine recently resurrected one of their most infamous covers, which instead of asking if God is dead now asks, “Is Truth Dead?” The difficulty of answering that question seems like a modern problem, but even Pilate cynically asked our Lord, “What is truth?” (John […]
American Christians are standing at a crossroads. Our society is becoming more hostile to Christianity in general and believers individually. In the face of rapid secularization, political uncertainty, economic instability, and ideological confusion, we must decide whether or not we will stand for the truth, or capitulate to the pressure. American society does not want […]
Introduction to the Conversation The question ‘Who am I?’ is deceptively simple. On the surface, we think we can immediately answer the question, but upon further reflection we discover we actually need a tremendous amount of help to understand our ‘selves.’ We need each other. Not just in order for our communities to function well, […]
