Last year the Frank Page, president of the SBC Executive Committee, convened a diverse group of Southern Baptist leaders to forge a consensus statement on the issue of Calvinism in the Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinism Advisory Committee has now released their statement titled, “TRUTH, TRUST, and TESTIMONY in a TIME of TENSION.” The statement is 3,243 words in length, and I believe it addresses concerns that Baptists on both sides of this issue have had. This is a good statement, one that I hope that Southern Baptists will unify around.
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Confronting Senator Portman’s use of scripture to affirm gay marriage
Last week Senator Rob Portman announced a dramatic reversal in his views on gay marriage. He cited a number of reasons, but the main catalyst was his son’s coming out of the closet two years ago. As a result of that revelation, Portman says he began to reconsider his own opposition to same-sex marriage. In an op-ed for The Columbus Dispatch, Portman explains: Two years ago, my son Will, then a college freshman, told my wife, Jane, and me that he is gay. He said he’d known for some time, and that his sexual orientation wasn’t something he chose; it was simply a part of who he is. Jane and…
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Lincoln: Clothed with immense power? Really?
Like most movie-goers, I was in eager anticipation when I first heard the news of Steven Spielberg’s new Lincoln movie. After the trailer was released, however, my enthusiasm was significantly dampened. That initial glimpse into the movie looked dull. But then after the movie came out, I read reactions from folks who saw the movie before I did. To a man, they all indicated that the movie was much better than the trailer. So my expectations for this movie went from high to low then back to high again. I was eager for the good reports I’d heard to be right.
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Fall 2012 Issue of JBMW
The Fall 2012 issue of JBMW has some fantastic resources in it, and it is available now for free from the CBMW website. Contributors include John Piper, Tim Challies, Tony Reinke, Heath Lambert and more. I’ll be highlighting some of the articles here in days to come. For now, you can download the entire journal here or link to specific articles within it below. The table of contents is below.
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Final Thoughts about LSU vs. Alabama
In my prediction earlier this week, I said that Alabama would win and that there was no other team in the country that could touch the Crimson Tide. I was wrong about that. LSU dominated Alabama in every stat except the one that counts–the final score. LSU had few penalties. LSU never turned the ball over. Zach Mettenberger finally showed up and led the team to put up over 400 yards of offense on the best defense in the nation. It was really impressive. At the end of the day, however, Alabama had it when it counted–like all championship teams do.
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The New Evangelical Subordinationism?
In recent years, evangelicals have engaged in a vigorous debate over the doctrine of the Trinity. One group argues that the Father and the Son are equal in authority and power with the Son submitting Himself to the Father only temporarily during the incarnation. Another group argues that the Son’s submission to the Father is functional (not ontological) and eternal. The debate has generated a great deal of discussion not only because it effects the foundational doctrine of God, but also because of its connection to evangelical debates over gender roles. Egalitarians tend to hold the first view of the Trinity while some (though not all) Complementarians hold to the…
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Atheism, the NY Times, and My Hometown
I have to say that I was agog when I saw that the nation’s paper of record—The New York Times, the old gray lady herself!—contained a feature-length story about my hometown of DeRidder, Louisiana. I would never have imagined such a thing to be possible, but there it was. My hometown is a dot on the map. It’s a place that means the world to me. But like many other small towns across the South, it’s just not the kind of place that has much of interest for coastal elites. We have local celebrities, but very few national ones. The big events in DeRidder are high school football games and…
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Some Thoughts on Rick Santorum’s Exit
GOP candidate Rick Santorum announced the end of his campaign for the presidency today (see video above). He spoke of his ailing daughter Bella and of recent primary losses. I can’t imagine what it would be like to run a presidential campaign while tending to a critically ill daughter. His family surrounded him on stage during the announcement, and they all looked worn-down as they choked back tears. You can’t help but feel sympathy for their situation.
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Santorum Loses Douthat
If Ross Douthat is any kind of bellwether, Santorum’s candidacy for the GOP nomination is in trouble. Douthat shares Santorum’s communitarian and social conservative instincts, but now even Douthat sees Santorum as too hot-headed and undisciplined to win in November. He writes, In the (still-unlikely) event that Santorum captured the nomination, then, his campaign would probably be to social conservatism what Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign was to small-government conservatism: A losing effort that would inspire countless observers to declare the loser’s worldview discredited, rejected, finished. In the longer run, a Santorum candidacy might suggest a path that a more electable pro-life populist could follow, much as Reagan ultimately followed Goldwater.…
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Who’s Your Daddy? Could Be Ferris Bueller for 2015 Class
The freshmen class entering college this Fall has no remembrance of what life was like before the Internet, what this whole Communist Party fuss was about in Russia, and that Amazon was once just known as a river in South America. Ferris Bueller is old enough to be their dad, and they probably don’t know the name of the bar where everybody knows your name (MSNBC.com). Every August since 1998, Beloit College has compiled the Beloit College Mindset List, “providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall.” The paragraph above describe just a handful of cultural items that have shaped (or…