Category: Christian Culture
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Theological Identity Crisis (B)
Yesterday’s post was originally intended to be a stand alone, but once I got into it, there was more than a single post could contain. To recap briefly, I tried to argue that depending on how you qualify your understanding of TULIP, you may actually be more of an Arminian than a Calvinist. This is…
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Theological Identity Crisis (A)
Let’s try a little thought experiment shall we? Many people I know who are interested in theology would classify themselves as Calvinists. They do not all have the same theological convictions, but for the most part they would agree with TULIP: Total Depravity Unconditional Election Limited Atonement Irresistible Grace Perseverance of the Saints This acronym of…
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Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach
When break comes, I usually try to tone down the reading, but to keep in the rhythm, I’ll usually have a small stack of books with me. Most of these are ones that are unrelated to anything else I’m studying, so it’s kind of like a break (but not entirely). This winter break, one of…
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Gladiator and Ethical Paradox
For research on my thesis, I just finished working through Brian Godawa’s Hollywood Worldviews. I may post a more thorough review at some point, but in one of the closing chapters on spirituality in the movies, he makes a very good point about what many people talk about today concerning non-religious ethics. He quotes at…
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On the Value of Modern Biblical Scholarship
In reading through Frame’s Doctrine of the Word of God, he quotes C. S. Lewis who is responding to some claims of Rudolf Bultmann. Those claims in particular were that Jesus’ personality was of little interest or importance to the apostle John and Paul. Lewis, himself quite the scholar, in his “Modern Theology and Biblical…
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The Goodness of Inequality
Perhaps you’ve seen these bumper stickers around in the past few weeks/months. I recently just figured out what they meant. Don’t ask me to clarify how I got this notion, but for some reason I was associating these with Sweden (probably because of the colors). Only with a little reflection did I realize, “Oh wait.…
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The Diminished Chord of the Christian Life
[This post is part of the Reshaping Christian Habits series] My old percussion teacher used to joke that in a performance situation, if you made several audible mistakes, you could always claim you were doing afterward that you “were just playing jazz.” I have since passed this insight on to my students when prepping them…
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Understanding A Car Crash
Let’s start with a question: Should we start a parent murdering ministry? This may seem like an extremely odd, severely misguided question. So, let’s fill it out with some context… It comes from a point in yesterday’s sermon at The Village Church that Matt Chandler was illustrating. The point being that arguing from pure pragmatics is…
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Some Pre-November Reading
Over the weekend I read Carl Trueman’s new book Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative. Basically, to give you an idea who this book is mainly for, it breaks out into two groups of people: Those who love Glenn Beck Those who hate Glenn Beck I could I suppose add a third category for those…
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Hipster Christianity
While I sat in a Starbucks in Orlando reading this book back in early August, I had not idea how much attention it would later get. I should have realized though that a book titled Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide would definitely generate a buzz. Here a just a few reviews and interactions floating…