My mother has schizophrenia. Her illness had a profound effect on our family, especially when I was a young teenager. Like many other families, we stayed pretty quiet about what we were experiencing. My dad was a pastor for 10 years, and after that we ...
Who is the Holy Spirit? He is, of course, God, and he helps us know where God is. But in talking about “where” God is, Christians are forced to retain two equal and (seemingly) opposing truths. We must with one hand cling to God’s transcendence—the ...
The book that best helped me understand why there are so many different denominations is Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas. It was not written to explain denominations, but it does so in a backdoor way. In this book, Thomas explains how varied we are in ...
Many Christians think the Trinity is something they are supposed to spit out as part of their orthodoxy without needing to understand it very well. We have the idea—one we've taken for granted and never examined—that we can get on without ...
Many of us have asked if it’s okay to doubt our faith, but maybe the question should be, is it okay not to doubt. Shouldn’t we all be asking questions about what we believe?
In Scripture, believers are instructed to aggressively pursue all ...
A wide range of voices claims that a crisis of biblical interpretation is taking place. But contrary to many pundits, the crisis does not simply involve a decline in the Bible's authority. Even when the Bible is turned to as the authority, it's ...
North American evangelicals read the Bible—and the world—through Western eyes. Indeed, all human beings come to the Bible with cultural habits, deeply ingrained patterns of interpreting the world that inevitably shape—and sometimes ...
In inductive Bible study, we use some guardrails to keep our interpretation on track. To check that an interpretation of the text is legitimate, we should be able to answer the following questions affirmatively.
- Does the text support this interpretation?
The Greek word that we translate as "hell" is Gehenna. It comes from the Hebrew word for the Valley of Hinnom, or Ben-Hinnom, a valley that lies outside Jerusalem (see Joshua 15:8). It was infamous for being the place where children had been ...
If the New Testament is the story of a Man, then the Old Testament is the story of a people. If the New Testament is personal and intimate, then the Old Testament is communal and expansive. If the New Testament is a sonata, then the Old Testament is ...
I've always been intrigued by the idea presented in The Arabian Nights, when Aladdin finds the lamp and a genie permits him a wish. It makes me wonder what I would choose if given such a choice. Since I've never been wildly wealthy, the first ...
When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments, they were written in stone in a language that the entire nation of Israel could read.
David composed his poems of praise and petition, promises and pleadings, in the everyday language of his ...
Lingering. Habitual. Out of control. How would you describe the persistence of sin in your life? Many Christians, even though they are sincerely committed to following Christ, continue to live with besetting sins. They continue to feel as if they are ...
I'm a Lutheran Christian. Much like the Reformed Church, the Lutheran Church emphasizes the action of God in salvation, rather than our human actions. I believe that God gives us faith (Eph. 2:8-9) and calls us to himself (John 6:44), not the other way ...
Because we live in a largely therapeutic culture, evil is a slowly disappearing concept. But every once in a while we are shaken by a holocaust, a genocide, or the destruction of a World Trade Center, and we remember why we need that word. The Bible ...
One side believes social action was unjustifiably divorced from gospel mission a century ago during the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy. Voices on the other side recognize the goodness of seeking peace and wholeness for the suffering, but not at ...
To answer that question, I must first digress to explore how we know anything. All of our so-called "knowledge" involves an act of faith. I trust what my senses tell me, at the basic information-gathering level and at higher interpretive ...
Whenever something is copied by hand, frailties of human eyesight enter in, particularly if that document is old and some ink has faded. Copying is also long, tedious work. It would take a scribe several months to copy just one Gospel. In some secular ...
Martin Luther's 95 Theses are often considered a charter, a bold declaration of independence for the Protestant church.
But when he wrote nearly 100 points of debate in Latin, Luther was simply inviting fellow academics to a "Disputation ...
Martin Luther, John Wesley, and Dwight L. Moody in their respective centuries found ways to communicate the doctrines of sin and repentance to reluctant people. They transformed churches, universities, and nations with their message. No one has ever ...