Pastors, You Don’t Have to Be an Expert on Everything
Every once and a while I read a book that provides one of those genuine (and rare) light bulb moments. It’s not so much that the book changes the way you think about the world, but rather it explains why the world works the way it does. And in our ever-more-confusing world, that can be a game-changer.
One such book is Tom Nichol’s, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (Oxford, 2018).
Everyone’s An Expert
In this intriguing volume, Nichols catalogs how technological changes have provided the average person with unprecedented access to information. Through the internet, blogs, and the 24-hour news cycle, … Continue reading...
Your Greatest Doubts and Fears: A New Sunday School Class
“Don’t forget in the dark what you learned in the light.” –C.S. Lewis
These words by C.S. Lewis remind us that the Christian life can be filled with dark times—doubts, fears, and questions about all sorts of things. What if Christianity is wrong and we are deceiving ourselves? Why would God allow a world so filled with evil? If Christianity is true then why are there so many intelligent people who reject it? If God is real then why do so many Christians seem caught in sin? How can I say Jesus is the only way to heaven and not be arrogant and intolerant?
These are precisely the kinds of … Continue reading...
Is Deconstruction the Same as Deconversion? A Few Reflections on Reforming the Church
The last few years have been a rough stretch for the evangelical church. Plagued not only by a complex and intractable health crisis with COVID, the church has also faced an increasingly polarized cultural-political environment as well as numerous internal scandals involving abusive leadership.
Perhaps it is not surprising that this same period of time has seen a rise in so-called cases of deconversion—people who once claimed to be fairly run-of-the-mill evangelicals but then, for whatever reasons, decided this was not the life for them. And they walked away from the faith.
The high-profile cases of deconversion stories are well known: Rob Bell, Rhett and Link, Joshua Harris, etc. … Continue reading...
How Difficult was the Book of Revelation’s Journey into the Canon?
The story of the New Testament canon is a fascinating one, with many twists and turns. There are books that were accepted very quickly, almost from the start (e.g., the four gospels), and there are other books that struggled to find a home (e.g., 2 Peter).
And then there is the book of Revelation.
Few today would contest the claim that the book of Revelation stands as one of the most controversial, complicated, and esoteric books in the New Testament canon. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that its reception by the early church was equally complicated and controversial.
But, the story of the book of Revelation is … Continue reading...
What is a “Gospel” Anyway? A Few Thoughts on Gospel Genre and Why it Matters
When it comes to reading (and interpreting ) the Gospels, one of the fundamental questions pertains to the kind of document we are reading. What exactly is a “Gospel”? And did the earliest readers of these books know what they were reading?
Such questions may seem pedantic to the average reader, but they matter more than we think. Right interpretation is built on (among other things) correctly assessing the literary genre. We don’t read parables like historical narrative, nor do we read poetry (Psalms) like apocalyptic literature.
An example of confusion over “genre” in our modern world (though in a different medium) pertains to the growing practice of making internet … Continue reading...