11
Mar
2024
Religious Liberty: “We Give Thanks for the Freedom We Have to Worship Publicly”
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You’ve probably heard someone pray at church (and likely have prayed yourself) something like the title of this post: “We give thanks for the freedom we have to worship publicly.” This prayer is set in contrast to the experience of many Christians in different times and places where they had to hide their gatherings from... Read More
4
Mar
2024
Marriage Advice from a Dead Guy
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “Parenting Advice from a Dead Guy.” In that post, I introduced Eastern church father John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) and noted some parenting advice found in his book An Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring up Their Children. In addition to authoring... Read More
26
Feb
2024
Seated Upright, Fully Clothed, and in My Right Mind: Musing About Hermeneutics
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For those of you who knew about and prayed for my recent open-heart surgery, I want to offer my deepest thanks. The discovery and repair of two long-term heart issues has freshly tuned my heart, metaphorically speaking, to the doctrine of divine providence, easily one the most inexhaustible fields of theology, and perhaps my favorite.... Read More
20
Feb
2024
Does Matthew 24 Describe the Rapture of the Church? (Part 3)
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Read Part 1 of this series here. Read Part 2 here. In the last installment of this series, we examined the argument (a convincing argument, in my opinion) made by John Hart in Evidence for the Rapture that Matthew 24:29–41 was not intended to portray future events in chronological order. Instead, as Hart argued, it... Read More
12
Feb
2024
Does Matthew 24 Describe the Rapture of the Church (Part 2)?
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In this series, we are examining nine arguments made by John Hart in his essay, “Jesus and the Rapture: Matthew 24,” which appeared in Evidence for the Rapture: A Biblical Case for Pretribulationism. In the last post (available here), we examined Hart’s first argument in support of the view that Jesus describes a pretribulational rapture... Read More
5
Feb
2024
The Overlooked Scandal of the Mere Anglicanism Conference
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If you interact with certain segments of conservatism, you may have heard about a kerfuffle at the Mere Anglicanism conference held a couple of weeks ago in SC, which included speakers like Sam Allberry, D. A. Carson, Rebecca McLaughlin, Carl Trueman, and Calvin Robinson. The controversy centers around that last speaker, Calvin Robinson, an ordained... Read More
29
Jan
2024
Parenting Advice from a Dead Guy
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Eastern church father John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) is best known for his eloquent sermons (more than 700 are extant), wherein he worked verse-by-verse through books of the Bible. In fact, “Chrysostom” is neither a patronymic nor a demonym but rather an appellation (meaning “golden-mouthed”) given to him sometime after his death. Today, among the church... Read More
22
Jan
2024
Volition: A Function of Person or Nature?
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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., as a natural capacity) or in one’s subsistence (i.e., as a matter of... Read More
15
Jan
2024
Old Age, Death, or Something Else? The Meaning of Ecclesiastes 12:1–7
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One of the many interpretive challenges in Ecclesiastes revolves around the meaning of the closing poem in 12:1–7. Interpreters have often read the poem as an allegory of old age. There are a number of problems with this view, however, including inconsistency in the meaning of the symbols and a tendency to impose the reader’s... Read More
8
Jan
2024
Does Matthew 24 Describe the Rapture of the Church? (Part 1)
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The Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24–25 is the longest prophetic section in the NT outside of the book of Revelation. If the next prophesied event that believers are looking forward to is their gathering to meet the Lord in the air, you might expect our Lord to refer to this event in his lengthy prophetic... Read More