DBTS Web Articles
Perhaps you (like me) have had grand plans of working steadily on projects or sermons only to find that it is Saturday night, and tomorrow is the deadline. Modern ministry is full of distractions. It is challenging, perhaps now more than ever, to keep the main thing...
The other day Pastor Doran, Kyle Dunham, and I were discussing the advent of AI technology. Of course, AI has been around for some time, but its modern uses appear to be multiplying at an astonishing pace. One of the uses has me wondering how others think of the...
Lately, as a result of three factors I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the potential role Joseph plays in biblical typology. First, I recently read Samuel Emadi’s new book From Prisoner to Prince: The Joseph Story in Biblical Theology. Emadi makes a good case for...
Dealing with difficult passages requires that we keep four hermeneutical principles in mind: Principle #1: Interpreting difficult passages starts with understanding what the text says.Principle #2: Difficult passages must be interpreted in light the immediate...
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...
I recently came across a few interesting thoughts about infant baptism. The first is an excellent rejoinder by Jeff Straub to arguments that Baptist churches should allow those baptized as infants into membership. Some highlights: “The debate over baptism has raged in...
DBTS just hosted the Bible Faculty Summit, a meeting of faculty from various theological institutions. This year, we had multiple faculty members from institutions like Bob Jones University, Maranatha Baptist University, Faith Baptist Bible College in Ankeny, and...
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...
We can endure the worst kinds of pain when there is a meaningful purpose. A cadet can endure strenuous labor and exhaustion as long as he knows that his suffering is designed to prepare him for future battle. A mother can endure severe labor pains if she knows the...
Having suggested in my previous post that there was nothing magical or supernatural about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we turn now to the other tree: the tree of life. Was this tree of a character fundamentally different from the first tree? Let us...
Among the many trees in the Garden of Eden, Scripture tells us, stood two trees of great significance: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. This pair of posts is an attempt to understand the nature, effects, and relationship of these two...
* Note this is a two-part series. The first part details my theological reservations about the book. The second details some of the insightful elements a discerning reader may nevertheless gain from the book. C.S. Lewis was a master of imagination. Most Christians...
David Platt gave a talk yesterday at the T4G conference that was an excellent challenge for all Christians to be more committed to pursuing disciples of Christ among all nations. He especially urged believers to do more to see the gospel go to unreached areas/peoples....
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:...
Writing after World War I, the British War and Air secretary Winston Churchill avouched his support for Zionism, a movement that afforded in his view a welcome counterpoise to the menace of communism: “Some people like the Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man...
Breaking news: We are all going to die. But prior to death, we lose our strength and energy. Old age comes with waning strength. Memory starts to slip; instability and immobility become a norm of life. Young, healthy people don't think about the later years as...
Ok, the title of this post is a bit misleading. The following quote from Sinclair Ferguson is not directly about the Rice Lecture this Friday, but it is about the book Dr. Joel Beeke co-authored on pastoral criticism, which focuses on the same topic as the lecture for...
Anyone who has read, listened to, or studied contemporary leadership theories knows that vision is touted as “the essential ingredient for successful leadership” (Hyatt, The Vision Driven Leader, p. 21). If you are among my older readers you may have endured the...
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...
That may seem like an odd title, but it captures a leadership principle that is important. I hope it is obvious that Pharisees make for terrible spiritual leaders since their core belief system is contrary to the gospel. People who trust in their own righteousness...
There is a lot of talk these days about how the culture is disintegrating and about concerns for whether the next generation of Christians will have the courage and conviction to take the stands for the name of Jesus Christ that will be necessary. There are legitimate...
In the last year I’ve had a few conversations with lost people in which the apparent contradictions of Genesis 1 and 2 were used as examples of errors in the Bible. The accusation was made that the Bible contradicts itself; therefore, it’s a book like any other...
Arguments happen all the time. They occur in a variety of places (office, home, school, church, etc.) on a variety of topics (sports, theology, politics, behaviors, policies, finances, foods, plans, etc.) and between a variety of people (friends, strangers, spouses,...
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,...
Kyle Dunham, our OT professor, has been working on what I think will become the definitive treatment of Ecclesiastes (to be published Evangelical Exegetical Commentary series). One of the fruits of that labor is the production of many good article-length treatments of...
“But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” Acts 6:4 As the passage quoted above indicates, pastors are called to devote themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word. The first is usually considered outward-facing (preaching), while...
In today’s episode of Theologically Driven, Dr. Snoeberger mentions the distinction between the virgin birth of Jesus and the “Immaculate Conception,” a teaching of the Roman Catholic Church about Mary. Dr. Combs, former professor of New Testament at DBTS, wrote a...
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...
One of the challenging questions that churches and biblical counselors face is, “Should we counsel an unbeliever?” Jay Adams used to call counseling an unbeliever “pre-counseling.” The reason for his clarification was that he defined biblical counseling (or nouthetic...
It’s been several years since I have taken time to write anything other than Tweets about Fundamentalism, but a new book and a blog post piqued my interest recently. When I saw that Dr. David Beale, under whose teaching I greatly benefitted as a college student and...
Three things excited me about this book. First, it deals with sanctification, a topic central to the Christian life. Second, it is in a series of books called Union, which is edited by Michael Reeves. I reviewed one of the titles in this series before (Rejoice and...
This article is adapted from Bryan Murawski's book, "Preaching Difficult Texts of the Old Testament" (Hendrickson, 2021). Someone once said, “The devil is in the details.” This trite idiom encourages you not to underestimate the details in a...
When we think of Jesus, what comes to mind? My thoughts immediately turn to His sacrificial love for me on the cross. I think of hymns and texts of Scripture that talk about Jesus being a friend. Hymns like: What a Friend we have in JesusJesus, Savior, blessed...
DBTS has launched a new podcast, Theologically Driven. This podcast is for those who want to know God through His Word and have that knowledge drive their decisions. In this podcast we will be discussing issues of theology, biblical studies, preaching, church life,...
Some of my previous university students, many of them bright students, have embraced the view that homosexuality is biblically acceptable. I have seen this trend especially among those who either embraced homosexuality themselves or are close to others who have...
Some time ago I took up the question of whether God intended ancient Israel to serve as a verbal witness proclaiming God’s salvation to the nations. In other words, did Israel have a “missionary mandate” in that she was commissioned directly by God to be a missionary...
Today in the library, I stumbled upon four new students toiling away on a research and writing assignment. This encounter reminded me of when I started seminary, and what I wish I knew then that I know now in my final year. Over the past four years, numerous books...
The last several months have included a lot of opportunities for Christians to think about the government. Contested elections, controversial judicial decisions, political scandals, progressive laws, and changing health orders have led believers to wrestle with what...
Books don’t often make grown men cry with joy, but I have heard that Reeves’s book on the Trinity (Delighting in the Trinity) has done so. That book is still on my reading list, but when I heard Reeves recently wrote a book on the Fear of the Lord, I knew I had to...
“Fifty years ago many colleges and universities and theological seminaries were devoted to the truth of God’s Word. But one by one they have drifted away, often with all sorts of professions of orthodoxy on the part of those who were responsible for change.” It sounds...
“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,...
I suggested in a previous post that something like the following is a good foundation for determining the limits of governmental authority over the church: Christians/churches must submit to every government regulation unless it would mean disobeying God (i.e., cause...
As Christians in North America continue to transition from governments that were largely favorable or neutral to Christianity to governments that demonstrate an increasing animosity toward traditional Christianity, believers and churches will be forced to wrestle more...
With Tim Stephens’s[1] recent arrest in Calgary, Alberta under the charge that his holding church worship gatherings outdoors was a violation of current health regulations, many have been arguing rather vociferously that Tim and other pastors in Alberta (like James...
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...
*This article was originally posted in 2015. Its relevance has not lessened. Animal Farm, George Orwell’s satirical story criticizing Stalin and the Soviet Union, was first published in 1945. What may be surprising to some is the difficulty Orwell had in getting the...
Dr. Doran recently preached a series of sermons addressing a significant problem in our day: anxiety. This was a timely series and the sermons are filled with biblical and practical guidance for fighting against the sin of worry. You can listen to the sermons here:...
Brett McCracken has written a helpful, short book on managing our information-overload world. He rightly notes that though we live in a world of exponentially increasing knowledge, such knowledge has not done much to make us wise. The book breaks into two unequal...
Post-Christian society is full of deniers—Christians unwilling to cede the loss of Christian influence and often unaware that this loss has irreparably occurred in American culture. These deniers are still agitating to restore Christian privilege: getting the Bible...