Undeception

I am aware that a few of my theological positions are considered by many of my evangelical readers to be “liberal” (e.g. my beliefs on origins and biblical inerrancy). But this post will (unfortunately and unintentionally) be likely to cause controversy due to its blatant conservatism. More conservative, it turns out, than most modern evangelicals.
Anyone [...]

[Read more →]

Mike Beidler over at The Creation of an Evolutionist has a post up with a link to an overall excellent interview with he brilliant Denis Lamoureux, author of Evolutionary Creation, conducted by CanadianChristianity.com. Check it out!
On a side note (and I do think that this is just a side note), Lamoureux has spearheaded an effort [...]

[Read more →]

(A preliminary note to the reader: Different believers use different definitions of the term “inerrancy.” When I use that term below I am referring to the hypothesis that the Bible contains no factual errors or contradictions of any kind, scientific or otherwise. If you accept that the Bible contains scientific errors, but consider these to [...]

[Read more →]

Recently I have been involved in a couple conversations with folks who aren’t really “informed” (I use the term loosely) creationists but have been hounded enough by creationists/biblical literalists who have drawn the battle line twixt themselves and evolutionists/biblical contextualists that they sit down firmly just on the creationists’ side of the fence — just [...]

[Read more →]

This post is prompted by two recent comments, from two different commenters on two different issues. But their answer, it seems to me, is related.
I was asked, “Why wouldn’t Jesus say that evil would be forever dead instead of having this eternal fire to go to? Even if it was recognized as an exaggeration at [...]

[Read more →]

It is my belief that Revelation’s Lake of Fire/Fiery Sulfur was never intended to be read as an actual geographic location (even in the spiritual realm), but was a colorful apocalyptic image meant to depict and dramatize final termination of various sorts, including punishment. The key indicator of this is that the sulfur imagery and [...]

[Read more →]

I was recently asked to contribute to a podcast for Love for All Ministries, a group of young Christians dedicated to honest, intellectual dialogue with non-believers of all walks and creeds. The topic for the discussion when I was on was “Hell”. I haven’t talked much about hell on this blog so far, so I [...]

[Read more →]

I have recently been dialoguing with a new full preterist friend, Patrick Stone, about the timing of the millennium. Early on in the conversation, the possibility was raised that the First Resurrection of Rev 20.4-6 occurred at the beginning of the Roman-Jewish war and corresponds to the resurrection of the martyrs at the time the [...]

[Read more →]

I have not tried to find a reason to disagree with the majority when it comes to my theological positions.  Any reader of this blog will recognize that this has nevertheless happened on occasion.  Chiefly, theistic evolution puts me at odds with most evangelicals and full preterism puts me at odds with most believers.  In [...]

[Read more →]

Cliff Martin continues his interesting discussion of the apparently conflicting ideas of the loving Christian God and the God who ordained the sometimes brutal processes needed for evolution. I see no more problem with God’s authorship of evolution than I see with natural evil of all other kinds, but he makes some interesting arguments about [...]

[Read more →]

Consider divine action in the origin of the world to be like the strokes of a cue stick in a game of billiards. Label the balls into three groups using the words “heavens,” “earth,” and “living organisms,” and let the 8-ball represent humans. The young earth creationist depicts the Creator making single shot after single [...]

[Read more →]

I have been musing lately about how my stance on the creation/evolution controversy would impact other areas of theology if applied consistently. The stance I’m referring to is my conviction that viewing the history of the natural universe as a string of miraculous interventions into nature is hopelessly misguided. I have argued that the atheistic [...]

[Read more →]

Setting: Joe returns home after work to find a package on his doorstep: it’s a present from his friend Jim in Milwaukee! How thoughtful of him! He opens it up to find a book on origami, a topic of common interest among the two and their mutual friends in the Origami Club. Overjoyed, he calls [...]

[Read more →]

Note: I regularly break what seems to be an unwritten law for blogging that says that, except for minor editorial fixes, one shouldn’t edit posts that add new information without some kind of notification. I have added a little more material to this post to make my arguments more clear; my position remains the same, [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve had a poll running for a couple months asking Undeception readers what topics they’re interested in seeing me address. I decided to give it a while and see if trends emerged. Well, I just noticed yesterday that there is indeed a small trend. At present, there is a four-way tie for second place: Linguistics, [...]

[Read more →]