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...
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...
I just finished reading Samuel Miller’s book Thoughts on Public Prayer. As the title suggests, the book does not offer a cohesive treatise on the topic, but a governing thesis nonetheless emerges: since prayer rivals preaching as the most important of a pastor’s...
Why a Commitment to Inerrancy Does Not Demand a Strictly 6000-Year-Old Earth - SnoebergerDownload
A pair of articles on the question of whether to send one’s child to a secular or to a Christian college here and here and discussed further here has recently captured my attention. My eldest son is a high school senior and this decision is imminent for him, so I’m...
Last week I had the distinct pleasure of teaching the presuppositional approach to apologetics to a group of believers in Tanzania, most of whom had no more than an elementary education. More challenging to my goal than any deficiency of education, however, was a...
One of the more interesting discoveries I made when researching Baptist polity a few years ago was the lost practice of “recognition councils.” Most Baptists are familiar with ordination councils, in which a local church calls together a group of elders and messengers...
I am not a handy person. The tool chest in my basement contains only a few basic tools, many of which were given to me by my dad when I left home. Next to my tool chest is a 1995 edition of Home Depot’s very useful book Home Improvement 1–2–3, also given to me by my...
I just finished a helpful book by Thomas E. Bergler, The Juvenilization of American Christianity (Eerdmans, 2012). Those of you who know me know that books on youth ministry are not my typical cuisine, but this was no typical book on youth ministry. Instead, it was a...
I just finished reading a marvelous little tome by Carl Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, and cannot help but exclaim its merits. It is, in a word, an apologetic for the discipline of systematic theology, but more than this, an apologetic for publicly chronicled and...
We are conditioned at times to think that grace and theology are confined to the spiritual realm—to believers and the church. Outside of the church independent forces like politics dominate. But when President Obama uttered the words “These tragedies must end” in the...
One of the commonest errors about law relative to Christian conduct is that God no longer uses fear or laws to promote Christian conduct. I was born and raised in a fundamentalist milieu that was at times excessive in its proliferation of rules and regulations. I...
On 12 October 2012 the Roman Catholic Church inducted a new class of saints, including a 17th-century Mohawk woman named Kateri Tekakwitha. Hope for the canonization of this patroness of Montreal has been in the works for nearly 130 years, but her sainthood was...
In my last post, I suggested that the role of the pulpit in preparing a congregation for the upcoming presidential election is more complex than simply identifying relevant biblical values at stake in the election and offering corroborating textual support. Instead,...
As an interim pastor charged in part with exposing the Scriptures so as to inform the moral and ethical decision-making of a congregation, I have been forced to consider the role that the pulpit should play in the upcoming presidential election. The simplest model,...
Kingdom through Covenant Review Article - SnoebergerDownload
Distinctive Contributions of Alva J McClain and GTS - SnoebergerDownload
The intersection of common grace with special grace is on my mind today, but not for a particularly "spiritual" reason. Bow season has begun here in Michigan and I'm anticipating the pleasure of taking one of my boys out this afternoon to see if one of us can woo a...
I was just informed that iTunes is offering an electronic version of Coming to Grips with Genesis for the special low price of $2.99. This special is good for the month of August only. This collection includes a number of scholarly essays on the book of Genesis from...