Dr. Albert Mohler explains why he signed the Manhattan Declaration in an article on his website (see my remarks here). Here’s his reason in a nutshell: “There are several reasons, but they all come down to this — I believe we are facing an inevitable and culture-determining decision on the three issues centrally identified in this statement. I also believe that we will experience a significant loss of Christian churches, denominations, and institutions in this process. There is every good reason to believe that the freedom to conduct Christian ministry according to Christian conviction is being subverted and denied before our eyes. I believe that the sanctity of human life,…
-
-
Render Not to Caesar What Is God’s
I just finished reading and signing The Manhattan Declaration (MD), and I urge you to do the same. The Manhattan Declaration is a document affirming the sanctity of human life, the sanctity of marriage, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty. All three of these items are under siege in our culture today, so a group of Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians have drafted this statement and call upon others to defend life, marriage, and religious liberty. You need to read the entire document, but I would like to highlight the end. It commits signatories to civil disobedience under certain conditions. It’s punchy and dead-on: “Because we honor justice…
-
Piper in Prison
John Piper left the ETS meeting in New Orleans on Wednesday to go and preach to the inmates at Angola prison in Louisiana. Louisiana is my home state, and Angola is infamous here. As Piper notes, “This prison is the largest maximum-security prison in America. It is one of the most famous prisons in the whole world. It has only murderers, rapists, armed robbers and habitual felons. The average sentence is 88 years, with 3,200 people in one place serving life sentences. Ninety percent of the inmates will die here.” As I said Louisiana is my home state, but I did not know about the wonderful, redemptive work that is…
-
Google Brain-teaser
Tim Challies posted a link this morning to “15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid.” It turns out that Google is hiring again, and they like to ask hard questions in their interviews. In fact, you might say that their interview questions are like taking the GRE. Here’s one of the brain-teasers they use when interviewing product managers. See if you can figure it out before looking at my answer in the comment section. Let me know if you got it right. You have eight balls all of the same size. Seven of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you…
-
Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right
The New Yorker recently published a must-read interview with Jon Shields, the author of The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, about the history of the organized opposition to abortion and its evolving relationship with American politics. Among other things, Shields says this: “The pro-life cause has indeed resonated in a liberal, rights-oriented culture far more than other “culture-war” issues. Even as attitudes toward gay marriage and gender roles have rapidly liberalized, abortion opinion has been remarkably stable since the early nineteen-seventies. The remarkable spread of social liberalism, therefore, has not left our nation any more pro-choice than it was in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. There is…
-
Turning the Bible into Toilet Paper
I mentioned yesterday that I am in New Orleans this week to deliver a paper on homosexuality at the Evangelical Theological Society. Yesterday I came across an article that relates to the subject matter of that paper. In an interview with Details magazine, gay actor Ian McKellen says that he tears pages out of Bibles that he finds in hotel rooms. Some of the Bible pages are hung up in his bathroom as toilet paper. Here’s the exchange:
-
McLaren, Homosexuality, and the New Testament
I am back home in the Bayou State for the 61st Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. The meeting is in New Orleans this year, and the theme is “Personal & Social Ethics.” I will be delivering a paper on homosexuality. Here’s the title: “Why Evangelicals Should Ignore Brian McLaren: How the New Testament Requires Evangelicals to Render a Judgment on the Moral Status of Homosexuality” For all of you in New Orleans this week, I’d love to see you there. Here’s the place and time of my presentation:
-
Look What the Cat Dragged In
There are certain moments in life that you never forget–those indelible moments that fix themselves in memory, sometimes for happy reasons, and sometimes for not so happy reasons. I had such a moment in the latter category when I was in the 8th grade. A friend of mine handed me a newly-released rock-and-roll album from a band that was just making its mark on popular music. I remember right where I was standing in the schoolyard of my junior high school when he gave it to me. The album cover showed four big-haired overly made-up vixens on the front of the album, and I remember thinking: “Wow, these girls are…
-
New JBMW
The Fall issue of The Journal for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood is now out, and you can download five of the articles from the JBMW website. Both of the “Studies” are worthy of special note. Dr. Andreas Köstenberger responds to Philip Payne’s New Testament Studies article on 1 Timothy 2:12, and Barry Joslin contests Craig Blomberg’s translation of “Son of Man” in Hebrews 2:5-9. I think you’ll find a great deal of useful material here, and if you are not a subscriber you should sign-up today. I’ve included the table of contents below.
-
Chandler in SBTS Chapel
Matt Chandler had my number in chapel today. It was a spiritual wallop that I needed. Don’t miss this one. Hebrews 11 Psalm 141:5 “Let the righteous smite me in kindness and reprove me; It is oil upon the head; Do not let my head refuse it.”