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...
Read Part 1 of this series here. Teaching Indirectly Related to Justification As was stated in my previous post, FV is not primarily concerned with soteriology, much less justification. However, some of their teaching in other areas helps to shape their understanding...
For hundreds of years the word “book” has suggested a stack of printed pages bound together along one edge and filled with ideas in the form of ink. But this is quickly changing. Today we live in a world where the phrase “reading a book” no longer necessarily invokes...
I love productivity. So, you can imagine my excitement when I heard about the 2023 E3 Pastor’s conference. This year’s theme is “Focused and Faithful: Dealing with Distractions and Demands in Ministry.” One of our guest speakers is Reagan Rose. He is working hard to...
You may have seen an advertisement recently with striking black and white photographs, thought-provoking statements, and the phrase “He Gets Us. All of Us.” During the Super Bowl, $20 million was spent to air two commercials, one saying Jesus wants us to be...
If you are trying to read through the Bible this year there is a good chance you have recently finished the book of Exodus, are in the middle of it now, or will soon be starting it (depending on what kind of plan you use). When you read through the account of God's...
Many people are looking for excuses to do less for God. This post is not for them. This is for Christians who tend to burn the candle at both ends, for people who have a hard time saying “no.” I regularly meet with people who are overwhelmed with life. Sometimes it’s...
Even though there has been a steady rise of in-person and online gambling over the last several years, few voices seem to be speaking out against this societal ill, a true threat to human flourishing. While some of the focus inevitably needs to deal with the role of...
The quotation in the title of this blog post comes from Henry David Thoreau, who more broadly warns that “We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
If you are a current pastor looking to strengthen your counseling ministry or are a church member not interested in vocational gospel ministry but would like to be better equipped and trained at helping others with God’s Word, consider pursuing the non-degree ACBC...
Recently, I have been reworking my notes on the book of Revelation for a survey course I teach at the seminary. Since I do not have the luxury of spending months preaching through the book (as Pastor Jacob recently encouraged us to do), I was considering how to...
Thomas Kidd, a professor of Church History at Baylor University, is personally invested in the answer to the question posed in the title of his book. He is invested, because he calls himself an evangelical, and he fits in the historical stream of those who have borne...
Singing has evolved dramatically throughout Church history. And like many other cultural phenomena, it is evolving more quickly today. This gives our generation a unique opportunity to study that evolution as it happens. I’m not writing today about organs and pianos...
In my first post, I began to explore the notion of a “missionary mandate” for Israel in the Old Testament. Last time, I considered the background for this idea, namely, the theme of God’s concern for the nations in the Pentateuch. In this post, I survey the...
Note: This post, as well as future posts concerning the Septuagint, are rough drafts for a potential upcoming book on the Septuagint. Accordingly, these posts will be removed at a future date. In regard to this article, it is the first of two which seek to analyze and...
It is not unusual to find arguments, both from atheists and Christians, that Christmas was started as an attempt by Christians to try to usurp/replace pagan festivals with a Christian one. Atheists make this argument out of an attempt to mock Christians and undermine...
A message from Dr. Doran: Dear Friend of DBTS, Happy Thanksgiving! God has been gracious to us and is worthy of every bit of thanks, and more, that He receives. I am looking forward to a fun and refreshing time with family and friends on Thanksgiving Day, then...
These things happened to them as examples, and they were written as a warning to us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. So says the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:11. The statement caps a rapid-fire sequence of references to the Old Testament in a timeless...
In the past few weeks, a number of significant new commentaries have been released, and several more are on the immediate horizon. Below are a few of the more interesting additions. Douglas Moo, Romans, 2nd ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018) Originally...
Brother or Sister in Christ, Every one of us must find our righteousness in Jesus Christ and in Him alone. He lived perfectly (the way we couldn’t) and died sacrificially (in our place) and rose victoriously! He is our hope for being made right with God, overcoming...
Previously I began a series on intertextuality by providing a brief history of the term and of the controversies surrounding its meaning. In this post I begin to discuss intertextuality in the context of biblical studies. Three important questions loom over the...
Recent weeks have found me immersed in the study of intertextuality, a trendy and cherished buzzword in academe. Defining intertextuality has proved notoriously difficult, with nearly as many definitions as interpreters. Nevertheless, since its coinage in the late...
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...
I feel a bit inadequate to write on a topic on which so many with greater experience than I have written at length. I don’t purport to be an expert on writing homilies; only rarely have I had extended seasons of life where I have had to write a weekly (much less...
On this day 499 years ago, a monk named Martin Luther (1483–1546) approached a church door in Wittenberg, Germany and posted a list of topics for academic debate at the local university. With this relatively innocuous act Luther started a movement that developed into...
The following post is part one of a two-part series. The conclusion will follow on Friday. Over the next several weeks observant Jews will enter one of the busiest and most important religious seasons of the year. Starting at sundown, October 2, and running through...
A few weeks ago I asked the question concerning how much those committed to evangelical faith should engage with progressive scholarship.[1] The reader’s responses were helpful, pointing mostly to limited and purposeful engagement. Let’s say we follow this advice and...
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 back I posted a piece on being conservative. In it I suggested that in every sphere of life there are foundational absolutes to be conserved. This is so because God is the immutable source and standard of all that is good and true and beautiful. There is...
Last Saturday at the Cincinnati Zoo, a gorilla was killed to protect the life of a 4 year old boy who had fallen into the gorilla enclosure. The gorilla, named Harambe, was a member of an endangered species, with less than 175,000 western lowland gorillas worldwide....
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...
Back when I was in seminary, one of my professors used to warn us seminarians to be neither “more pious than Paul” nor “more Christian than Christ.” Such a stance might win us halos on earth, but no crowns in glory. This instruction was never more vivid to me than...
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...
If you love Jesus, you will love His Church, plain and simple. If you have put Him at the center of your life, you will put the center of His work in this age, The Church—particularly your local church—right there as well. You will find time to go. You will find...
While the Psalms are familiar to many Christians, understanding them is often difficult. Part of this difficulty relates to the poetic nature of the Psalms. With this entry I will describe the type of poetry found in the Psalms. Approximately one-third of the Bible is...
One of the best-known lines from St. Paul is found at the beginning of his letter to the Philippians where he says, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (1:21). I think this was my life verse for at least a few years. In fact, I’m pretty sure I put the...
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...
I’ve recently noted our society’s increasing loss of true tolerance, as well as the dangers of the current orthodoxy working to suppress other ideas. But what I have not yet considered is whether tolerance is even a good thing. To simplify things, let’s simply focus...
“Love is love.” That slogan has popped up countless times in our nation’s dialogue in recent days. It’s part of an effort to shape the hearts and minds of Americans on social issues. It’s simple, succinct, and catchy. It has some appeal, especially to people who value...
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...
It's flu and virus season, and if you're a public speaker, you probably worry at least occasionally about the possibility of losing your voice. Many years ago, I read some advice from Charles Spurgeon in pages 203-4 of his Lectures to My Students, and in a moment of...
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 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...
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...