Two ostensibly unrelated items on the religious news landscape caught my eye this week. On closer inspection however I think they are intimate dissections into the dysfunction of American evangelicism and into the dysfunction of my own warped soul. First, Texas Senator and possible 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz stormed off the stage after […]
Read more "Hubris or Holiness? Can Evangelicals Tell The Difference?"Throughout the spring I’ve plodding through The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus, a 7th Century monastic leader of the Eastern Church. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I simply trying to get out of my comfort zone a bit. Though its not accurate to say the book has been ignored in the West, […]
Read more "Unexpected Springs from the Desert"Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here. We’ve been looking at problems with Baptist theology from a historical standpoint. This Part 3. Let’s dive in: Issue 3: How can every Christian be expected to interpret the Bible for themselves? It takes years to learn even the basics of biblical […]
Read more "Wait . . .What? Baptist Dispatches From Deep In Church History, Part 3"I like to think I don’t just believe things because I grew up with them. I like to think I am clear thinking and will follow facts to their conclusions, however uncomfortable. For any low church, evangelical Baptist like myself, diving into church history can be a jarring experience. As we wade back through the years […]
Read more "Wait . . .What? Baptist Dispatches From Deep In Church History, Part 2"Clarence Jordan was unusual. After earning a PhD in Greek from Southern Seminary in Louisville, he, his wife, and another couple left the academic world and at the height of Southern racial apartheid founded Koinonia Farm in southwest Georgia. The farm’s mission was to model a holistic community – a community dedicated to interracial fellowship, […]
Read more "“Lazarus got what was left.”"I’m not normally one to troll apologetics sites as I don’t really enjoy apologetics. However, I came across this intertextual analysis of the famous “Feeding the 5,000” story. The Bible certainly has difficulties, but it also has remarkable interlocking details which would be extremely difficult to make up or fabricate decades later. This is one […]
Read more "Did The Feeding Of The Five Thousand Really Happen?"So this will be a little different from any other post I’ve done. I’m just going to ask a series of questions and leave it at that. I don’t really have any answers. Why are the people who suffer most in our world the most religious? I know, obviously that’s a gross generality. But […]
Read more "The Problem of Pain or Privilege?"The two accounts of the death of Judas in Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18-19 are often cited as an irreconcilable, case and point that the bible cannot be true. Is that so? Let’s take a look: Possible death explanations: 1) They are different angles of the same story. If this is the case, Judas would […]
Read more "How Did Judas Die?"I recently finished reading Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry. As a former history teacher, I thought I knew this period of the American story fairly well. As a Baptist, I have long respected Roger Williams and his willingness to […]
Read more "Humility, Truth and the Legacy of Roger Williams’ Fight for Religious Freedom"I’ve had a couple of people ask recently about the historical reliability of the Gospels? How do we know they are true? How do we know they are not some combination of fabrication, myth and wishful thinking? What is my response? First and foremost, we don’t know for 100% certainty. We don’t know anything from […]
Read more "How Do We Know The Gospels Are True?"
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