Monthly Archives: May 2012

Do You Obey God with Hopefulness?

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hope

God has a habit of asking his people to do difficult things.  Unthinkable things.  Nonsensical things.  He asked Noah to build a 400 foot ark in the middle of dry land.  He asked Gideon to send 32,000 troops home before the battle with the Midianites, leaving him only 300 men.  And he asked Hosea to marry an unfaithful woman—a prostitute.   In all such instances, God calls his people to radical obedience.  He calls us to trust Him.

But do we?  The issue isn’t just whether we obey.  The issue is how we obey.   Do we do the difficult thing God is calling us to do with hope and confidence that …

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Biologos, Theistic Evolution, and Misplaced Confidence

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darwin

Theistic evolution is nothing new.  For generations, Christians have attempted to import the evolutionary process into the early chapters of Genesis in hopes of finding a harmony between the two.  The organization Biologos is devoted to this very task.  According to its website, Biologos exists for the purpose of “exploring and celebrating the compatibility of evolutionary creation and biblical faith.”

While the existence of theistic evolution is certainly not new, I have been struck by the degree to which it is promoted with evangelistic zeal by Biologos.  The goal of this organization is not just that theistic evolution would be viewed as an “allowable” view amongst Christians, but that theistic …

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Did God Really Say? A New Book on the Authority of Scripture

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9781596383999

Last year at the 2011 General Assembly for the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), I participated in a conference on the authority of Scripture that was sponsored by Reformed Theological Seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary, and Covenant Theological Seminary.   Two scholars from each institution were asked to present papers on a variety of different topics.   The idea behind the conference is that the church is never finished waging the battle over the authority of the Bible–each new generation needs to do its part to address contemporary issues.

Those papers have now been gathered together in a book edited by David Garner: Did God Really Say? Affirming the Truthfulness and Trustworthiness of …

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Canon Papers for ETS 2012

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ets

A number of years ago, Stan Porter and I founded a new study group at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS): New Testament Canon, Textual Criticism, and Apocryphal Literature.  Although issues related to text and canon were quite prevalent at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and other related academic societies, we realized that ETS did not have a centralized place where these issues could be explored.  Since the group began we have had five years of excellent papers on a variety of topics.  And the coming 2012 ETS meeting in Chicago is no different.   The theme this year for the invited session is “Implications of Canonical Formation on Interpretation.”  …

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