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
Notes (PDF)
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...
I get the question a few times a year: “Why does it matter whether we get future right? Everything will get sorted out when we get there. What we need to worry about is the present—being what God wants us to be and doing what God wants us to do right now.” An...
Donald Trump’s stay on admitting certain immigrants has brought out a raft of evangelical critics, especially those who see everything as an immediate gospel issue. Arguing from the facts that (1) God says nice things about foreigners in the Bible (e.g., Lev 19:33–34)...
When a person self-describes as “conservative,” the meaning of the adjective can be elusive. Conservatism can be noble in one context and ignoble in another. What gives the word meaning, ultimately, is the explanation of what one is conserving and what one is allowing...
Bill Barrick, long-time professor at The Master's Seminary and friend of DBTS, just wrapped up a list of his most highly recommended commentaries on the Old Testament. This is an outstanding list that is hard to improve upon. Highly recommended.
The very first recorded words of Adam have sometimes been the stuff of jokes—the words of a lovestruck fellow who has seen a beautiful woman for the first time: “Look what became of my bone!” he seems to say: “Whoa, Man!” But on closer look, Adam’s words communicate...
Every year about this time we get a spate of blog posts from within fundamentalism and elsewhere about the viability of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) in view of (1) its skimpy doctrinal basis, (2) its tendency to the speculative and esoteric in its...
The use of the term literal in dispensational hermeneutics has had a rocky history. Even if we can get past the snickering claims of critics that literalism disallows figurative language (which no advocate of literalism has ever affirmed), the term is still not...
Those of you who know me know that I don’t like to self-identify as an evangelical. The label has some usefulness, of course. Were I to use it, the label would inform people that I hold to inerrancy in some form. It would inform people that I am not a card-carrying...
No doubt all of us are aware of the disparaging remarks that were made about prayer in the aftermath of last week’s shooting. Among others the New York Daily News discouraged prayer on December 3rd with an article entitled “God Isn’t Fixing This.” So we’ve reached...
We’ve been hearing a lot of warnings these last few years about the coming persecution of Christians. And a look around the globe reveals that public sentiment really is turning perceptibly against Christians—chiefly abroad, but with fresh harbingers here on American...
The pope is finally gone and I am happier for it. He has practically no redeeming qualities and has left a trail of carnage from the moment he arrived until the moment he left. Make no mistake: he is the incarnation and personification of the worst sort of evil...
With all of the hullabaloo this week over the visit of antichrist (not THE antichrist, mind you, but surely one who most overtly and offensively epitomizes John's general description of the spirit of antichrist), it is a delight to point our readers to a free eCopy of...
I cannot compete with the vast onslaught of blog heavyweights who have all, it seems, trained their guns on last week’s SCOTUS decision. But I’d like to chip away at one question that seems to be less than fully addressed, viz., the precise nature of government’s role...
A couple of weeks back Bob Jones University made the news by apologizing for statements made a generation ago suggesting that homosexuals should be subjected, like they were during the Mosaic economy, to capital punishment. This mea culpa was a welcome one insofar as...
A few months ago Bill Combs and I released a pair of blog posts that raised ire among some of our readers relative to the debate concerning divine sovereignty and human freedom. One of the barriers to fruitful dialogue that emerged in the ensuing discussion was one of...
In the latest issue of the Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Claire Bryan runs an intriguing article, “Born to Believe?” The basic thrust of the article is that part of the human tendency toward “being religious” stems...
When one thinks of the primary sins in our world today, we tend to think big, pointing to sins like murder, abuse, sexual sins, and possibly blasphemy or idolatry. Very few of us, I think, would leap up to suggest that the sin of ingratitude should supplant these...
It’s mid-September here in Michigan. The much-anticipated, season-changing cold front has gone through, the mornings have become crisp and clear, and the first smells of Autumn have started to fill the air. And this week my son and I are observing a little-celebrated...
For my whole life I’ve been broadly a part of an ecclesiastical culture/movement that has been disinclined to commit either to Calvinism or Arminianism. A steady stream of articles, essays, and blog posts have kept this delicate balancing act alive for decades (for a...
While visiting a church a few weeks back I heard something I’ve not heard in many years: a sermon on predictive prophecy. Not a general sermon on the Second Coming, the final judgment, or the joys of heaven, but a sermon on the grind-it-out details of eschatology from...
Last week I received one of those Tweets that had been forwarded about a half dozen times before it landed in my inbox. It purported to offer an idea for a “Calvinist Graduation Card”: “Happy graduation. You did nothing. You are nothing. So just march.” It was funny...
Commencement season has revived a fresh spate of debate about separation. Should Liberty University have invited Glenn Beck to speak? Should Al Mohler have gone to BYU (again)? And related, should Bob Jones University have invited Dennis Praeger to speak? None of...
I recently had a conversation with a man who made a major life decision that turned out poorly. This man apparently did everything right—he based his decision on careful research of the available facts, the application of sound biblical principles to these facts, the...
Last week in this blog post, I suggested that if the current surge of evangelical social attentiveness shares identity with surges that preceded it (as Joel Carpenter has affirmed), then we should look to history to accurately predict the course and end of the current...
I just finished browsing through an engaging new title, The New Evangelical Social Engagement. No, it’s not an obscure book by a rock-ribbed fundamentalist who remains skeptical about the conservative resurgence in evangelical life (though it might cast a few of these...
I’ve visited sub-Saharan Africa a few times and have started to get a handle on the grassroots economic theory that dominates the local villages: zero-sum economics. In brief, traditional African culture understands that there is a fixed amount of wealth available at...
It’s now been two weeks since the big debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. Everyone who watched has an opinion about who won and why. And most all of them, it seems, have blogged about it. Everyone who didn’t watch the debate also has an opinion about who won and why,...
This morning I scanned through an interesting book put out by Georgetown University that analyzes the value of 171 common college majors available today. By “value” the authors mean almost entirely fiscal value, or how much money a graduate can expect to make after...
I just finished Scott Oliphint's generally excellent book on apologetics, Covenantal Apologetics (P&R, 2013) and was fixing to write a review when I stumbled upon an insightful review by Paul Henebury to which I had very little to add. In short, I would agree with...
The Duck Dynasty controversy has finally slipped into the periphery, and most are glad to leave it that way. Franklin Graham, however, recently fired a parting shot—and one that crossed a key line of demarcation. Specifically, he expressed “amazement at how many...
The hymn “Joy to the World,” published by Isaac Watts in 1719, is one of my favorites. But it’s not my favorite Christmas song—because it is not a Christmas song at all. The hymn is instead based on Psalm 98 and conceived by Watts as a proleptic anticipation of the...
Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, this year in Baltimore, MD. The ETS is a professional society made up of several thousand professors, students, academically-minded pastors, and other thrill seekers who...
Billy Graham just preached his final sermon (well, sort of—it was more a few sentences inside of a state-of-the-art video presentation). We’ve not seen a lot from him lately, so we instinctively tuned in to hear America’s pastor one last time. Everybody liked it. It...