In this post I resume my series of blogposts on historically/theologically freighted phrases/clauses/mantras that have become cliché in contemporary Christian-speak—lines that are intrinsically innocuous (i.e., the words themselves are unobjectionable) but sometimes...
Ben Edwards and Mark Snoeberger talk about believers baptism.
A few weeks ago I was alerted to a criticism raised about an old blog post of mine—a post in which I argued for a universally shared a priori awareness of linguistic laws that make possible the successful reading of Scripture by all image-bearers. We...
Introduction and Preliminary Thesis A few years ago, a colleague alerted me to the humorous rumor that I had formally denied the existence of natural revelation.((Dr. Snoeberger, who writes the extended introduction of this article, is Professor of Systematic Theology...
Ask your average evangelical Protestant what it means to “be saved” and you will likely hear about an event occurring within history, usually in the legal sense of justification, though occasionally incorporating more existential terms of new birth. So something like…...
Ben Edwards talks to Mark Snoeberger about his contribution to a recently released book on dispensational.
Ben Edwards talks to Mark Snoeberger about the use of evidences in presuppositional apologetics.
Ben Edwards talks with Mark Snoeberger about different ways to approach Apologetics.
Evaluating the credibility of historical revivals is not a new exercise in the history of the Church. We are made aware that the multiplied “awakenings” of early American history are not all of a sort, and that some proved more credible than others. Iain...
We live in a hyper-sexualized and semi-pornographic culture. The problem dominates popular advertising, pervades our entertainment choices, and even weasels its way into our churches. The concept of modesty is no longer a standard for judgment, but an object...
You can read Dr. Snoeberger's article here.
Notes
The death and Resurrection of Christ together represent the pivotal event of the Christian Scriptures. In these two paired incidents are contained the seeds from which the whole Christian Gospel sprouts, and in them are seated the great Christian hope that I am...
In this episode Ben Edwards and Mark Snoeberger discuss the significance of the virgin birth.
In 1964, George Eldon Ladd argued that the Church functions as “Custodian of the Kingdom” (Presence of the Future, 276). For many, this designation sounds either (1) too Catholic (salvation is found in the organized Church alone) or (2) too Reformed (the Church IS the...
Notes
For as long as I can remember, there have been waves of concern within conservative Protestantism about antinomianism, roughly one per decade. For instance, we have seen movements such as… Norm Shepherd and the movement that bears his name John MacArthur and “Lordship...
When one thinks of the more egregious sins in our world today, we tend to think of sins like murder, assault, sexual sins, idolatry, and the like. Very few, I think, would place the sin of ingratitude high on this list. The Apostle Paul, however, does not share our...
The question of a pastoral “call to ministry,” reminiscent of God’s call of biblical prophets and apostles, has long been a issue with which ordination councils have been concerned. Many operate on the assumption that no one aspiring to the ministry may proceed...
With Valentine’s Day just behind us, lingering questions remain about the concept of love. What is it? Is it a choice? An emotion? Some combination of the two? Or something else? My thesis today is that this perpetual debate continues because we have lost the salient...
The question of the absence or presence of the indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament is a relatively new question in theology. Prior to the twentieth century, the question is almost entirely absent from the literature. In fact, one is hard...
In the Gospels Christ several times promises that the Spirit will supply appropriate words to his disciples in seasons of persecution (Matt 10:19–20; Mark 13:11; Luke 12:11) and will “remind” them of what Christ had told them (John 14:25–26; 15:26–27). Do these...
The fact that Christ speaks regularly and with vivid imagery of faith as having dimension (it can be little or great and can grow) and even as having material properties (it can be the size of a grain of mustard) leaves some imagining that faith by its nature is an...
Last week the satirical news site Babylon Bee made the national news with a post distasteful to some, mocking a health-and-wealth guru after she proved herself a fraud by dying. While that story was making the headlines, a less popular post titled “Conservative...
Back when I was in seminary, one of my professors used to warn us seminarians to be neither “more pious than Paul” nor “more Christian than Christ.” Such a stance might win us halos on earth, but no crowns in glory. This instruction was never more vivid to me than...
When Justin Taylor released a blog entry last Wednesday defending a non-literal use of days in Genesis 1, and thus suggesting at least the possibility that the universe is quite ancient, both Ben Edwards and I sat down, without consulting, to write responses. While...
As a conservative instructor at a conservative school, I occasionally meet with surprise that I use and love my NIV Bible. Classed by most as coming from the “functionally equivalent” school of Bible translation, the NIV has long been viewed with skepticism by many in...
A Tale of Two Kingdoms - SnoebergerDownload
A few weeks back I offered a tribute to my dad for being a good parent to an unbelieving child (yours truly) by (1) being an agent of common grace, introducing me to “received laws” that God communicates generally to man in his image (language, logic, conduct,...
“OK, men, everyone gather around, and let’s get this football season under way,” Coach Paul deTarsus bellowed out. As the young recruits swaggered over, jostling each other manfully, Coach deTarsus continued gruffly, “This year the school steering committee has asked...
The recent tiffs over the role of personal obedience and activity in sanctification is symptomatic of a much deeper theological struggle that has intensified in the last decade, viz., the definition of union with Christ and the relationship of that union with...
In the wake of the furor of my last blog post, I was heartened this week to discover a helpful post by Rick Phillips that cuts to the very heart of the question of the believer's participation in sanctification. The post, titled Thank God that Christians Are Not...
I'm a cynic and a pessimist by nature. Usually, if "everybody is doing it," I don't. I can't tell you whether it's my sin nature, my metacultural bent, or a regenerate distrust of fads and mania in general. And maybe in this case it's my affinity for the Pittsburgh...
The parent church of DBTS, Inter-City Baptist Church, hosts a conference every second January to stimulate and cultivate interest in foreign missions. The next Student Global Impact (SGI) conference is just two weeks away. Scheduled strategically to accommodate...
Weakness of Wisdom Fundamentalists and Romans 14 1 - 15 13 - SnoebergerDownload
Noetic Sin Neutrality and Contextualization - SnoebergerDownload
The eternal generation of the Son has been a staple element in Christian orthodoxy since Nicaea, and its formulation doubtless occurred earlier:((Dr. Snoeberger is Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. An earlier...
I’ve decided to start a mini-series of blogposts on historically freighted phrases/clauses/mantras that have been detached from their moorings and have become cliché in contemporary Christian-speak. Most of the time these lines are intrinsically innocuous (i.e.,...
As questions in the ongoing Trinitarian controversy become more refined, the “pieces” of the broader discussion are coming under greater scrutiny. One of these appurtenant issues is the locus of the will, that is, whether volition is seated in one’s substance (i.e.,...
Notes
Ben Edwards talks with Dr Mark Snoeberger about the theological nature of Revivals.
Fifteen years ago, my late mentor Rolland McCune passed me a baton, namely, his class on dispensational theology. ((Dr. Snoeberger is Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary.)) Dr. McCune routinely taught that...
The words Reformed and Baptist mean something and they are and always have been mutually exclusive. So begins one of Scott Clark’s several diatribes on the paradox of Reformed Baptists, the latest of which hit the fan a couple of weeks back...
The fact that all truth is interconnected and sourced in the Triune God means that God in Christ may be rightly connected to every datum of truth in the whole universe. Many argue that faithful preaching, in fact, will make such a connection in every sermon:...
I attended Bible College in the 1980s and seminary in the 1990s. The time I spent earning my Master of Divinity at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary still stands for me as the most grueling four years of my life. But I had accidentally prepared for it for years,...
Introduction As was the case in the previous article of this journal, the question addressed in this article is the destination of the souls of Old Testament saints at death: Did they go (1) to an undifferentiated “place of the dead” to which all human souls descend,...
“The Christian does not desire going to heaven; they desire to go to Christ, and wherever He is, there is heaven.” The twitter post caught my eye, and left me perplexed. Had the statement been that the Christian does not merely desire to go to heaven,...
A few years back I made a proposal that we replace the label “literal translation” with a better one—originalism—a term that has been robustly defined away from competing hermeneutical ideas in the secular/legal sphere. For decades the dispensationalist has dealt...
In my last blog post I addressed the irrational distrust that is increasingly plaguing religious and political conservatives. Specifically, I suggested that we ask of our theories about, say, mask mandates, social distancing, and vaccines, “Why would all these people...