I want to thank all of you who have read and interacted with this site over the last year. I am grateful for every one of you. For those of you who are interested, I give you the top 10 blog posts from 2018. This blog is a combination of content creation and content curation, which means that I sometimes write original material and that at other times I pass on to you items that I find interesting from elsewhere on the interwebs (although over the last few years the curation part has moved more and more to Twitter and Facebook). A number of items on this year’s list surprised me. Posts about John Chau appear twice on this list, and I am glad for that. Without further ado, here is the list.
10. If same-sex attraction is sinful, then what? Having made the case that same-sex attraction is sinful, I explore what some of the practical implications of that would be.
9. Some reflections on the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. I’m kind of surprised that this post made the top ten. It’s my annual round-up of goings-on at an academic conference. In any case, Preston Sprinkle and I hosted a debate about The Nashville Statement, and my commentary on that is featured here.
8. What about divorce and abuse? Most evangelicals believe that the Bible allows (but does not require) divorce when the marriage covenant has been violated by sexual immorality or desertion. But what about in cases of abuse?
7. Hatmaker explains why she rejected the “bad fruit” of the Bible’s teaching about sexuality. In an interview with Pete Enns, Jen Hatmaker says that she embraced gay marriage because of the Bible’s teaching about “bad fruit.” I try to explain why this is an erroneous application of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7.
6. Slain missionary John Chau’s mission is not white colonialism; it’s the great commission. John Chau lost his life trying to reach the Sentinelese people with the gospel. After news of his death began to spread, his sacrifice was denigrated and criticized. I believed and still believe now that those criticisms were misplaced. This post is my initial pushback to the critics. After more details came out, I wrote more. That post is number 1 on this list.
5. What about the Revoice Conference? When I first heard about the Revoice conference earlier this year, I wasn’t even going to write about it. Only after readers asked about it did I put up this initial post. Little did I know how much time I would spend writing about the controversy over the course of the summer. I won’t link all the posts here, but perhaps the most important one is the piece that Rosaria Butterfield and I co-authored for The Public Discourse: “Learning To Hate Our Sin without Hating Ourselves.”
4. Top Ten YouTubes of 2018. Well, this was a surprise. An end-of-the-year list actually got enough hits to make this end-of-the-year list. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t ya think? A little too ironic? Yeah, I really do think.
3. The End of BibleWorks. The company that produces my favorite Bible software went out of business. This news is inside baseball for Bible nerds, so I was surprised that this post made the top ten list at all, much less at number 3!
2. Albert Mohler answers questions about social justice. Albert Mohler offered public remarks about social justice in the wake of the release of the “The Social Justice Statement.” I really appreciate what Mohler had to say on this.
1. Mission agency clears away some false assumptions about John Chau’s missionary work. I’m really grateful that John Chau appears on this list twice and that this post appears at number one. I am still dismayed that so many people (including Christians!) treated Chau’s sacrifice with such smug derision. I have a feeling that the calculus in heaven about Chau’s death is much different than the contempt so many expressed here. Our children know Chau’s name. They know he died trying to bring the gospel to the Sentinelese. And we honor his sacrifice.
