• Theology/Bible

    A Critical Review of Matt Walsh’s Documentary

    Matt Walsh’s watershed documentary What Is a Woman? made its debut over a year ago, but he recently made it available for people to view for free on Twitter. It was supposed to be available only for 24 hours, but as I type this it is still available and has a staggering 161 million views. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend that you watch it. It really is a cultural watershed, as I tried to explain in my review a year ago: Matt Walsh has done the planet a great service by producing this film. It is a case study of what happens when fantasy meets hard…

  • SBC

    Warren at War with the BF&M

    Liberalism and pragmatism aren’t the same thing, but they often lead to the same destination. Liberalism guts the authority of Scripture by assaulting the Bible’s integrity. Pragmatism guts the authority of scripture by pitting “what works” against “what’s true.” The latter approach is on full display in a recent mass email that Rick Warren has sent to as many Southern Baptist pastors as he could find. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. There are a number of howlers in this thing, but the gist of Warren’s message is that Southern Baptists have to make a choice between following a confession or doing the Great Commission.…

  • SBC

    A Resolution on Opposing Gender Transitions

    One of the most astonishing developments of late modernity has been the mainstreaming of transgenderism. In retrospect, the path to our current moment is clear enough (see Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self). Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing grown men in earnest behaving like a cartoonish caricature of an adolescent girl. And yet examples of this kind of thing are proliferating, and anyone refusing to go along with this risks all manner of social and perhaps even professional ostracism and recriminations. It is like Americans have gotten a really bad fever with no indication in sight that the fever will ever break.…

  • SBC

    Responding to the Baptist21 Proposal

    Southern Baptists have been having an intramural debate about how to ensure that our complementarian convictions remain a firm part of our cooperative effort together. Thankfully, there seems to be broad agreement with what the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M) says. We can’t be certain until the annual meeting next month, but I’m reasonably confident that we have broad agreement about what to do with Saddleback. Nevertheless, there is still some disagreement about other measures that we might take to make sure our complementarian commitments are clear. Pastor Mike Law has proposed an amendment to the SBC Constitution that would add some clarity, and I have already endorsed that proposal…

  • Christianity,  Sermon,  Theology/Bible

    Preaching the Trinity from John’s Gospel

    I have recently begun preaching through the Gospel of John at our church. The first three messages have been on John’s prologue. (Sorry, Peter Williams, but I still think John 1:1-18 is a prologue!) As many of you already know, John’s prologue is thick with the grist of Nicene Trinitarianism and Chalcedonian Christology. I do not claim that these messages are the best there has ever been on these verses. Far from it. But I do want to acknowledge that I couldn’t have preached these messages seven years ago. For all the unpleasantness of the so-called “Trinity Debate” of 2016, the Lord has used it for good in my life.…

  • Complementarianism,  SBC,  Theology/Bible

    A Word about Spurgeon and Female Pastors

    Earlier this week, it was announced that Rick Warren had been installed as the honorary Chancellor of Spurgeon’s College in London. After his installation, Warren took the opportunity to double-down on his support for female pastors and to claim that “my views on ordination are identical to Spurgeon’s.” I am no expert on Spurgeon, but I am reasonably certain that Warren’s views on ordination are not identical to Spurgeon’s—at least insofar as it relates to the ordination of female pastors. In his book Lectures to My Students, Spurgeon devotes an entire chapter to “The Call to the Ministry.”* In that chapter, I can see at least three differences between Spurgeon’s…

  • Christianity,  Complementarianism,  SBC

    Rick Warren Knows Exactly What He Is Doing

    The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) announced earlier this year that Saddleback church had been removed from the SBC over Saddleback’s calling female pastors. Just yesterday, the news broke that Saddleback has appealed that decision, which means that the matter will come before the messengers to the annual meeting in June in New Orleans. Rick Warren cites five reasons for Saddleback’s appeal. First, Warren claims that “we’re challenging the ruling on behalf of millions of SBC women” who are forced to sit on the bench and cannot participate in the Great Commission. This is a false claim. Southern Baptists believe that God calls and gifts women for ministry. It’s written in…

  • Theology/Bible

    What does “modesty” refer to in 1 Timothy 2:9?

    I have seen some debate recently about what “modest” means in 1 Timothy 2:9. Some say it addresses extravagantly expensive clothing while others claim that it addresses sexually provocative clothing. Here’s the text: “Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire…” –1 Timothy 2:9 I just did a round-up of major commentaries on the question. By and large, they don’t treat the term as an either/or but as a both/and. In general, they argue that in the ancient world ostentatious dress was often for the purpose of appearing “enticing.” So to dress in a “modest” way…

  • Christianity,  News

    The Remarkable Conversion of Molly Worthen

    I cannot recommend highly enough Collin Hansen’s interview with historian and journalist Molly Worthen (watch or listen below). I listened to it this morning, and it is one of the most encouraging testimonies that I have ever heard. Worthen is a historian at the University of North Carolina and a journalist who has written extensively and sometimes critically of evangelicalism. In this interview, however, Worthen shares how she came to Christ last year after being a skeptic for virtually her whole life. It is really a remarkable story. It is so easy to become cynical. Even for Christians, there is a powerful temptation to let the darkness of our time…