Backsliding is a hard part of the Christian life, and we should not like it, but it shouldn’t cause us to despair or think we’re not saved because we are backsliding.  God’s people have gone through this trial before and we’ll go through it again.  Of course, it is also wise to seek to avoid... Continue Reading

“I recently came across an extended quote from Denis Alexander’s book Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? In this excerpt he helps readers understand the incredible amount of time encompassed by an evolutionary framework. But the deeper he goes into his argument, the farther he seems to go from the centrality of man in... Continue Reading

“The source of this Internet frenzy is Barton Swaim’s recent critique (“Stott Bowdlerized,” First Things, May 2016, 17–19) of the third edition of Basic Christianity, published eight years ago in 2008. Upon discovering that the reviser had altered the first sentence of the preface “stupidly,” Swaim undertook a line-by-line comparison with the old edition.”  ... Continue Reading

In American evangelicalism it has become commonplace to hear of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. 1945) as a heroic, patriotic evangelical fighting liberalism and Nazi extremism.  Bonhoeffer was a brilliant and brave pastor-theologian who rightly stood against many evils in Nazi Germany, but he wasn’t a conservative evangelical.  We can learn many things from him, but we... Continue Reading

I’m saying everybody really secretly relies on God, but they won’t admit it. And what happens is that the regularities, the lawful regularities of the entirety of probability theory and the entirety of its application in various realms in life depends on these lawful regularities. They’re there, but the person who doesn’t believe in God,... Continue Reading

Sanctification is an extensive thing: it spreads to the whole man.  “The God of peace sanctify you wholly” (1 Thes. 5:23).  As original corruption has depraved all the faculties, the heart, mind, and will, sanctification is the renewing of all the faculties.  Therefore in Scripture it is called a “new man,” not a new eye... Continue Reading

It had been many years since I had read Basic Christianity, but somehow that didn’t sound right. Are young people—or were they in the 1950s—really opposed to anything that “looks like an institution”? They didn’t seem opposed, for example, to universities back then. So I took down my old copy of the book, a 1971... Continue Reading

You see, as I sat on that plane early in the morning, I was a bundled knot of anxiety, fear, worry, and sadness. I was worried about my son’s ear and how it would handle the flight. I was anxious about all the details that go with travel. I was grieving over broken relationships with... Continue Reading

“I have long advocated treating ancient texts, biblical or from elsewhere in the Near East, as ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ rather than ‘guilty until proven innocent.’  In other words, if a text, be it Egyptian, Assyrian, or Hebrew, makes a claim that X happened at location Y, or King A built a temple at site... Continue Reading

“One Nation Under God” is a perceptive and peaceable volume. Throughout the material the authors thoughtfully interact with several thinkers, to include Lesslie Newbigin, N.T. Wright, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard John Neuhaus, Abraham Kuyper, and Richard Mouw; and have crafted a handy, useable resource for Christians as we think sanely about our Nation, elections,... Continue Reading