I have been reading Francis Beckwith’s fascinating book about his return to the Roman Catholic Church from Protestant Evangelicalism. On page 83, there is an ironic little anecdote in which Beckwith says that Carl Trueman was a “catalyst” for his conversion to Roman Catholicism. I won’t explain the whole thing here, but in short Trueman had written an essay in which he claimed that Roman Catholicism was the “default” position for the church in the West. Trueman wrote that, “Rome has a better claim to historical continuity and institutional unity than any Protestant denomination, let alone the strange hybrid that is evangelicalism; in light of these facts, therefore, we need…
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‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul
If the ground starts rumbling beneath your feet on Thursday at about 4:30pm ET, just know that it’s me reading my paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Providence, Rhode Island (a paper unrelated to the aforementioned amendment). For those who might be interested, here’s the abstract summary of my presentation.
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Help Us Amend the ETS
I am co-sponsoring with Ray Van Neste a proposal to amend the doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS). Next week the Society will meet in Providence, Rhode Island where our proposal will finally come to a vote. I am writing this blog post to get the word out to our friends who are planning on supporting the amendment. If you support our amendment and have a blog, I’m asking you to link this post to help us spread the word. The process to amend ETS’s constitution is a slow one. The founders were wise to make it that way. Ray and I began this effort in the Spring…
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Hitchens vs. Wilson: A Collision of Lives
Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson squared-off in a recent series of debates over atheism. Hitchens is an atheist with an acerbic wit who thinks Christianity to be a blight on society. Douglas Wilson is a Christian who wants to show the reasonableness of the Christian faith. The video above is a trailer for a forthcoming documentary that describes the debates. (HT: Justin Taylor)
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Schreiner Critiques McKnight’s “The Blue Parakeet”
A couple of weeks ago Tom Schreiner contacted The Journal for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (for which I am the editor) and expressed interest in writing a review of Scot McKnight’s new book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. We were delighted to let him write the review for us and plan on publishing the review in the Spring 2009 issue of the journal. In advance of its publication in JBMW, the review essay will appear next week on the Gender Blog of the Council for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. I interviewed Tom last week for a new podcast that we have launched at Boyce College (where…
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Boyce College DiaBLOGue
As many of you know, I am the Dean of Boyce College, which is the undergraduate school of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Recently, Boyce College launched a website called “The Boyce DiaBLOGue.” The “DiaBLOGue” is a forum for the faculty of Boyce College and of Southern Seminary and for other invited guests. The new site is both a blog and a podcast that publishes content related to the Bible, theology, philosophy, and culture. In addition to traditional blog essays, the “DiaBLOGue” will also include a podcast (the RSS feed for the site is the feed for the podcast). Not only will the “DiaBLOGue” include messages from…
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Post-Election Reflections
I have written a great deal about the presidential campaign over the last year, and I think it’s only appropriate to share some things that I am grateful for now that it’s all over. 1. The Sovereignty of God. I am so grateful to serve a Savior who once looked into the eyes of a calculating Roman politician and said, “You would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above.” Jesus knew what has been true all along about the kingdoms of men. They rise and fall according to the ordination of a sovereign God. “The Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men…
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Presidential Election Results
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My Closing Argument for Life on Election Eve
Tomorrow America will go to the polls and elect the next President of the United States. In advance of this vote, I have used my blog space to make the case that the transcendent issue of this election is abortion, and I want to make this case one more time. The current law of our land excludes from the human community a whole class of human beings—the unborn. Right now under the regime of Roe v. Wade, it is legal in our country to kill unborn human beings at any stage of development from 0-9 months gestation. In other words, our nation’s laws do not recognize an intrinsic right to…
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John Piper on Voting for a Female Vice-President
On Friday, I noted a video in which John Piper makes remarks about Barack Obama. In that same video, he also has some things to say about Sarah Palin’s candidacy: “I personally think that it would have been better for [Sarah Palin] to stay at home with her disabled child–both for the good of the family and as a model for moms. So that’s a factor for me. I don’t think that biblically a woman should be the commander-in-chief of the . . . armed forces. And so that puts her in a very awkward position for me.” I noticed some commenters at Justin Taylor’s website who interpreted Piper to…
