In case you missed it, here is President Obama’s speech on healthcare reform to a joint session of Congress. Watch it above or read the full text here.

This morning I participated in a panel discussion of N. T. Wright’s views on justification. The panel met during the Thursday chapel hour at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Kentucky. Albert Mohler moderated the panel comprised of Tom Schreiner, Mark Seifrid, Brian Vickers, and me. The audio is available at both the Boyce College website and at the Southern Seminary site, or you can listen to it below. Or you can see the video here. [audio:http://www.sbts.edu/media/audio/fall2009/20090903panel.mp3] A colleague here at SBTS has e-mailed some items that we didn’t get to address during the discussion. His questions are in bold below, and my answers follow.

As Brian McLaren has drifted further and further off the reservation, I have taken to using scare-quotes whenever referring to him as an “evangelical.” Truth be known, however, he’s no longer even a scare-quotes “evangelical.” If you think I’m overreacting, wait until you hear this. On August 13, McLaren announced on his blog that he would be observing the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. This is not a joke. He writes,

Lee Irons has an interesting post on N. T. Wright’s view of the atonement. You need to read the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion: “It looks more like a case of using orthodox labels to refer to a position that is not orthodox. At the end of the day, for Bishop Wright, sin is an impersonal evil force, not personal rebellion against God; sin has bad consequences, but does not elicit God’s punitive wrath against the sinner; and the cross is to be understood as some version of the Christus Victor theory in which Christ defeats evil by letting it do its worst to him, not as a penal…

Boyce College professor Dr. Barry Joslin published a book late last year titled Hebrews, Christ and the Law: The Theology of the Mosaic Law in Hebrews 7:1–10:18. The book just received a favorable review in The Review of Biblical Literature. The reviewer is David M. Allen of the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham, England. Great work, Dr. Joslin!

Perhaps you have seen the YouTube video going around that claims to give biblical evidence that Barack Obama is the anti-christ (see above). The presentation sounds like a learned insight on the biblical text, but I assure you it is not. It is filled with factual inaccuracies and exegetical fallacies and should be discarded onto the scrapheap of crackpot-pseudo-intellectual hooey. Thankfully, Dan Wallace has disposed of this one in fairly short order. You can read it here. Wallace concludes this way: “Is he the Antichrist? In the least, the linguistic torturing required to make the biblical evidence say this is beyond the pale of reason and, perhaps, sanity.”

In the most recent edition of “Ask Pastor John,” Pastor John Piper answers this question: “Do you think complementarianism is so important to some people that they deny women more opportunities than the Bible denies them?” Listen below or visit the Desiring God website. [audio:http://media.desiringgod.org/audio/q_and_a/4141_do_you_think_complementarianism_is_so_important_to_some_people_that_they_deny_women_more_opportunities_than_the_bible_denies_them.mp3]