A good thing happened in my home state over the weekend. The voters of Louisiana made history by electing the first Indian-American ever to serve as a state governor, Bobby Jindal. The result was good for a couple of reasons. First, Jindal ran on an ethics reform platform. Anyone who knows anything about Louisiana politics knows that if Louisiana needs anything, it’s ethics reform. Politics in the bayou state has a sordid history (think Huey Long, Edwin Edwards and David Duke), and Jindal represents a break from that checkered past.
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Dallas Morning News Prints Misleading Story about Dr. Jeffress’ Sermon
The Dallas Morning News (DMN) ran a story last week about the Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas (where I am a member). The DMN was covering a recent sermon in which our pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress, used Mitt Romney’s candidacy as an occasion to make that point that Mormonism is not a Christian religion but that it is a cult. I heard Dr. Jeffress preach the sermon live, and I can confirm that there are at least two items in the DMN story that are inaccurate. The first is just factually wrong; the second is misleading.
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LSU Guts Out the Win Against Auburn
There’s no conference like the SEC. If Ohio State had to play the SEC schedule that LSU plays, they would already have lost two or more games. It is tough to win games in the SEC. Nearly every matchup is a hit-you-in-the-mouth street fight. Very few teams can run the gauntlet of the SEC and make it through without losing a game. The contest tonight between LSU and Auburn just goes to show how tough it is. But even though it was close, LSU still pulled out the win. One observation coming out of tonight’s game: the two quarterback game-plan is not working anymore, and with Matt Flynn back in…
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Wayne Grudem Supports Mitt Romney for President
People don’t usually turn to Wayne Grudem for advice about politics. He’s an evangelical theologian and scholar who has written what is perhaps the most widely used textbook on Systematic Theology among evangelicals. If you’ve got a question about any point of doctrine, Grudem is your go-to guy. Nevertheless, Grudem has just written a compelling article in support of Mitt Romney’s candidacy for president. It’s posted at Townhall.com, and it’s titled “Why Evangelicals Should Support Mitt Romney.” His bottom line is this:
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The Besetting Sin of Worry
Pastor John Piper has a good word for those who battle the besetting sin of worry. His remarks are in answer to the following questions: “Is there a place for worriers in the church? Or is it a problem that some people perpetually worry?” You can listen to him here, or you can read a transcript of his remarks here.
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The Gnosticizing Joel Osteen
Joel Osteen is making the rounds promoting his new book. He appeared on “Larry King Live” on Tuesday night. The video is available here, and the transcript is here. The interview with Larry King only makes me more wary of Osteen. When King asks him if he believes in an afterlife, Osteen says that his mortal body is like a “coat,” and that the “real me” lives on the inside. Osteen makes the same mistake that many people make with respect to the eternal state. He doesn’t realize that we live for eternity in resurrected physical bodies. The whole exchange smacked of the ancient Gnostic heresy which regarded matter as…
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Point of Clarification on Bible Versions
The Dallas Morning News has a brief story on Bible translation titled “Christian consumer’s guide to the Bible(s),” and they mistakenly categorize The Living Bible as a translation. It is not. When a Bible is rendered from one language into another, we call it translation. Translation happens anytime a scholar or a group of scholars reads the Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew originals and then translates them into a receptor language (like English in our case). There are two basic philosophies of Bible translation: (1) Formal Equivalence, which is a word-for-word approach to translating, and (2) Dynamic Equivalence, which is a thought-for-thought approach. All translations of the Scriptures fall somewhere on…
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Video of Joel Osteen on “60 Minutesâ€
The conversation about Joel Osteen is continuing under my previous post, “Joel Osteen’s Christianity without a Cross.” I’m writing this post as a follow-up to alert readers that the entire “60 Minutes” feature on Osteen is available at CBS.com. You can view it at the following link: “Preacher to the Masses.”
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CT Has Feature on the Gospel Coalition
Christianity Today‘s Colin Hansen has a feature on the Gospel Coalition titled “Tethered to the Center.” Be sure to read the whole thing, but here are the closing lines: “Imagine an evangelical movement led by churches that grow by multiplying, preach with theological substance and winsome apologetics, encourage holiness among members, engage their communities in areas such as politics and art, and even share economic resources and welcome the poor. Who can argue with these aims? If the Gospel Coalition’s churches can pull this off, they will have a much easier time persuading other evangelicals to return to the theological center.”
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J. P. Moreland Tweaks Mainstream Media
One of our favorite evangelical philosophers tweaks the mainstream media’s coverage of the abortion debate in America. The criticism appears in a recent blog post titled, “Michael Vick, Dog Fighting and Media Hypocrisy.” He writes: “Why won’t the media show pictures or video of abortions and aborted babies when they show the carnage of the Iraq war and the hideous dog fighting surrounding Michael Vick? Answer: It’s pure hypocrisy. The media is overwhelmingly secular and pro-abortion. The widespread use of ultra-sound pictures during pregnancy is decreasing the number of abortions. Similarly, if people were given the chance to view an abortion or its results on television, much of the abortion…