Go to your average weekly prayer meeting, and chances are it won’t be long before you hear a prayer dressed up with mindless filler that means practically nothing. We all know it would be really bad to lead out in prayer by saying, “God: here’s my prayer list: Frank,...
The NIV Zondervan Study Bible - SnoebergerDownload
Summer comes to a more-or-less official end this weekend with the celebration of Labor Day. The day is not so much about general labor, of course, but about organized labor (an issue about which the Bible is mostly silent and, when it does speak to the issue, is a bit...
A few weeks ago a theological kerfuffle erupted on the blogosphere. Several Reformed Confessionalists (whom I will call Carl Trueman and Co.) accused certain members of the evangelical complementarian community (whom I will call Grudem, Ware, and Co.) of Nicene heresy...
So said Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:23. And so we must agree with him. Still, I wonder whether this verse can sustain all the freight that has been loaded onto it over the years. Does it mean, as John Piper suggested a few months ago, that Christians should not carry...
Once again the anniversary of Christ’s death is opening up the question whether it is proper to say that God died on the cross, with good men leveling arguments at and past one another. Some argue that God, being immortal (1 Timothy 1:17; 6:16; etc.), by definition...
In the past few months I have encountered several conflicting ideas about forgiveness in unexpected counseling situations. Nor is the confusion confined to the uninformed or immature. The biblical idea of forgiveness is an elusive one that is often missed entirely or...
As an instructor in Systematic Theology I sometimes have conversations (whether formal or informal) over the merits of some point of theology or biblical application that end rather oddly with an appeal to “convictions.” The idea seems to be that if a person holds...
A Biblical Argument against Premarital Sex - SnoebergerDownload
The scientific community is abuzz this week with the announcement that liquid water has been confirmed on Mars. Of course scientists have long known that water is abundant in our universe (including on Mars), but specific evidence of a stable supply of liquid water...
A couple of weeks ago Union University made news by practicing secondary separation (or at least what fundamentalists have been pummeled over the last 70 years for practicing under that label): they broke fellowship with an organization of professing believers—the...
Having laid out in the previous several posts what I believe may be commended as “received laws of language,” I would like to close this series with a practical look at a pair of difficult passages that stretch the limits of the discussion: Matthew’s use of...
Having discussed two seminal axioms of language that seem to qualify as “received laws of language” (the Univocal Nature of Language and the Jurisdiction of Authorial Intent) and offering a qualification concerning the dual authorship of Scripture often raised by...
Having established two axiomatic principles of language that govern the intelligible use of words (the Univocal Nature of Language and the Jurisdiction of Authorial Intent), we need to pause, I think, to make an important qualification—not so much a third axiom of...
A second received law of language that may be deduced from common usage is the Jurisdiction of Authorial Intent. I proposed last week that a text can have but one signification in any given context; this week I suggest further that the sole arbiter of that...
We come now to the heart of this series, viz., a discovery of the “received laws of language” that we as humans unconsciously use every day as we engage in ordinary communication with one another. The material here is not new with me, but rather is a distillation...
When evaluating the truth or error of any proposed theological statement or system, there are two primary questions that the theologian asks: the question of correspondence and the question of coherence. In using these two terms, I am using two recognized...
For decades it was assumed, by both sides of the debate between dispensational and Reformed theology, that the primary distinction between the two models (there were really no other viable evangelical options in the early days) was hermeneutical—dispensationalists...
This week the Gospel Coalition’s annual meeting features a panel discussion with panelists who reject the Gospel. On the face of things this seems to be out of step with TGC’s founding principles, which exalt commitment to the Gospel as the singularly non-negotiable...
Another week of blogs, another contribution to the relentless stream of warnings to all Christians everywhere never to let music preference be a factor in deciding where to go to church, and above all never, ever to leave a church for this reason. This unremitting...
In our last post we appealed to John 17 to show that a properly ordered witness for Christ must avoid the two poles of (1) being both in the world and of the world, hoping the gospel will advance wordlessly through personal intimacy alone (Christ of culture) and (2)...
I work in an almost exclusively Christian environment. With the exception of a few brief encounters with folks delivering packages, reading the gas meter, and such, my whole workday is spent with believers. I’m not the best person, I admit, to speak of sharing Christ...
Last week, Pope Francis made headlines by announcing in his weekly address that we will be able to see our pets in heaven. Specifically, he pontificated, “Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.” Since this statement is sure to set the theological world abuzz, I...
Students sometimes ask me the difference between the hermeneutics employed by Covenant, New Covenant, Progressive Dispensational, and Traditional Dispensational theologian/exegetes. Perhaps the easiest way to answer is to offer an example of one of the most heavily...
With the election hard upon us, it is a good time to be reminded that nothing we do can rightly be divorced from the sufficient governance of Christian Scripture. No pockets of neutrality exist in any sphere of life, including our politics. While the battery of issues...
Among the many promises of John 14–17 are several that anticipate heightened activity by the Holy Spirit in the apostolic era. These have long been a source of both comfort and confusion to NT believers. Assurances that the Spirit would assume new functions of...
When I was a boy I grew up in a traditional American home. My father taught me the value of hard work, integrity, courtesy, and the disciplines of standing alone for right, offering a firm handshake, and looking people square in the eye. He had learned these things...
Normally when book reviews appear on this website, they’re for new books: cutting edge books that add some new piece of information or fresh analysis to our ever-growing bank of theological information. But we also need to reflect on historical gems—classic treatments...
Last week I read a curious piece that purported to identify the exact point at which Pilgrim was saved in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: was it at the wicket gate, at the foot of the cross, or perhaps even at some other point? I confess a measure of confusion on...
One of the more troubling mis-translations in the history of English Bible translation (at least in terms of its popular acceptance and impact) is the King James rendering of Luke 2:14 as "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." Despite...
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 legitimate standard for censure, but an object...
In this post my goal is to utilize the issue of homosexuality as a case study to demonstrate that the “Jesus + Nothing = Everything” approach to sanctification is not merely an academic wrinkle, but an error of such prodigious import that it threatens the very essence...
One of the tensions of pan-denominational evangelicalism that fixates entirely on Gospel essentials is the eclipse of the bookends of biblical theology: creation and new creation. Details about the doctrines of creation and eschatology are interesting, we are told,...
A few months ago I expressed some fairly strong reservations about a nefarious variation of “Gospel-Centered” sanctification that has captured the attention of a number of conservative evangelical luminaries—a preach-the-Gospel-to-yourself,...
Last week a respondent to one of my earlier posts chastised me for addressing matters of sin and sanctification because in doing so, I was ignoring the elephantine issues of “poverty, homelessness, abuse, ignorance, and injustice”—in brief, I was violating the spirit...
There, I've said it. OK, maybe (and I mean MAYBE) a case could be made that a mature believer could justify watching portions of the show as a means of cultural analysis and critique, but if a professing believer watched its totality as a means of entertainment or...
The blogosphere has been humming lately with questions of Christian freedom and Christian depravity, the role of faith and works in sanctification, the priority of law or Gospel in sanctification, and the like. Some have seized the “Gospel-Centered” banner and have...
I heard that phrase once a month growing up, and for years never considered the possibility that Baptists would administer the Lord's Supper any other way. I attend a church today in which I hear much the same thing, but now know that the practice is rarer than I...
With the arrival of the Passion Week comes the curious and often forgotten event of Palm Sunday. Christ's arrival in Jerusalem on that day was a truly triumphal event—a day of fulfilled prophecy where the Messiah rides into Jerusalem on a donkey (Zech 9:9) and...
Old Testament Lot-Casting - SnoebergerDownload
The use of the term passion has seen a huge uptick in conservative evangelical life in the past 25 years or so, roughly paralleling the sharp rise in influence of Reformed Charismatism in conservative evangelical theology and hymnody. The...
You’ve heard the mantra a dozen times: “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.” This statement is quite wrong. Firstly, because it’s a false dichotomy (can’t it be both?), but secondly because if we have to choose, Christianity is more...
The tendency among young men and women to delay marriage (or even to abandon it entirely) in contemporary Western society has given birth to a curiously parallel increase of interest in Paul’s passing comment in 1 Corinthians 7:6–9 about his own marital state...
A few weeks ago Doug Wilson outlined a solution to the “problem of prayer” in the face of divine sovereignty by championing the idea of special providence. Wilson is not, of course, the first to express this idea, but he does so uniquely and well,...
Pastor Richard A. Harris (1934–2021) was the pastor of my youth. By God’s grace and through his efforts the Bethel Baptist Church of Sellersville, PA, was chartered in 1962 in an unlikely patch of Bucks County that, despite the otherwise booming growth of that county,...
Every Believer Confident: Apologetics for the Ordinary Christian, by Mark J. Farnham. Sisters, OR: Deep River Books, 2019. 206 pp. $14.99. Serious students of apologetics are aware of the trouble that presuppositional apologists (a.k.a. transcendental, covenantal, or...
One of the most important philosophers of our day died last weekend, and almost no one noticed. Best known as a proponent of political conservatism (or Toryism in the British circles in which he lived much of his life), Sir Roger Scruton was also a champion of...
Understanding Affections in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards, by Ryan J. Martin. London: T&T Clark, 2019. xiv + 304 pp. $122.00. Ryan Martin is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Granite Falls, MN. He recently completed his PhD at Central Baptist Theological...
While talking to an acquaintance yesterday about a thorny Christological question, I made the statement that Christ was 100% God and 100% human. Pretty standard stuff. My acquaintance agreed, stating that he also believed this to be true, adding the caveat, “by...