Undeception

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 →]

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 →]

I come from a Christian tradition that downplays or contradicts basic principles of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics) on a regular basis. The starting assumption is that the Bible is God’s Word written; this effectively entails the idea that the Bible is about as divine as He is: inerrant because He is, authoritative because He is, perfect [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve not got much to say about this, but please check out Cliff Martin’s post that describes his thinking on the unchanging nature of God, progressive revelation, and the inspiration of Scripture. I don’t think I disagreed with anything he said. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe that the Bible is a unique book, inspired from Genesis [...]

[Read more →]

Lawrence Boadt’s excellent Reading the Old Testament has a chart on page 79 that illustrates some key differences between the way the ancients viewed history and the way we do today. We tend to be shocked when we discover that there might be any deviation from what we subconsciously have accepted as the only viewpoint. [...]

[Read more →]

Before I “took the road less traveled by” into historical linguistics, I was highly interested in ancient history, especially as it related to the Old Testament. I wanted to learn Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and of course Hebrew so that I could study the Ancient Near East (ANE) and how it related to the Bible. [...]

[Read more →]

Summary of Part One

God the Gardener created a son (Lk 3.38) to tend the garden.

God, as a father, was training up his children Adam and Eve in the garden.

Adam was put in a garden for instruction because gardening requires faith: both faithfulness in tending day by day and faith that what is planted and cultivated [...]

[Read more →]

In this week’s installment of Theology Unplugged, a podcast I highly recommend, Reclaiming the Mind Ministries president Michael Patton made the following comments about full preterists (like myself):
Now I would say, you can believe that, and you can make your arguments — and many people do from Scripture. I’m not persuaded at all by them [...]

[Read more →]

This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?
Part 2: What is inspiration?
Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture
Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility
Part 5: The literary-generic principle
Part 6: The authority of Scripture
Part 7: Case study: the Fall

So anyway what about [...]

[Read more →]

This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?
Part 2: What is inspiration?
Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture
Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility
Part 5: The literary-generic principle
Part 6: The authority of Scripture
The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin [...]

[Read more →]

This is the sixth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?
Part 2: What is inspiration?
Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture
Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility
Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Preliminary Remarks The purpose of these next few posts is to examine my perspective of [...]

[Read more →]

This is the fifth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?
Part 2: What is inspiration?
Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture
Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility
The Importance of Determining Genre
Because the Bible is a compilation of literary works, in order to get the sense [...]

[Read more →]

This is the fourth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?
Part 2: What is inspiration?
Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture
In the discussion of the mode of the Bible’s inspiration I pointed out that the Bible is a compilation of literary contributions empowered [...]

[Read more →]

This is the third of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?
Part 2: What is inspiration?
We can summarize the previous discussion by saying that 2 Timothy 3:15-17 teaches that these writings collectively known as the Bible have been infused with the breath of life from God’s own lips, [...]

[Read more →]

This is the second of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?
This leads us to the specific meaning of the word theopneustos. The phrase “inspired by God” seeks to render this enigmatic near hapax legomenon which is a compound adjective with the components theos ‘God’ and pneustos ‘breathed’, [...]

[Read more →]