When I was three years old, I asked my pregnant mother whether Jesus could come into me as my baby brother had come into her. It was my inept way of saying that I wanted to accept Jesus into my heart as my personal lord and savior, an idea to which my Evangelical church had already introduced me. . . . . Continue Reading »
The prosperity gospel—which declares that God’s grace is manifest in gold faucets, private jets, and multimillion-dollar homes—has no answer for the countless agonies of earthly life. Continue Reading »
By the time of her death this past summer, Elisabeth Elliot—wife, mother, missionary and writer— had become one of the leading Evangelicals of her time.Born Elisabeth Howard in Belgium in 1926, she was the daughter of missionaries, and one of six children. Her family eventually moved back to . . . . Continue Reading »
From the introduction to Evangelicals and Catholics Together at Twenty: Vital Statements on Contested Topics (Brazos, 2015), edited by Timothy George and Thomas G. Guarino, with foreword by George Weigel, and prefaces by Timothy Cardinal Dolan and J.I Packer. This volume contains the nine public . . . . Continue Reading »
On Wednesday evening, a capacity crowd assembled at the Calvary Chapel on the campus of Biola University for a roundtable discussion on the future of the Church. The event was co-sponsored by Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute, First Things, and the Theopolis Institute.The four speakers represented . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1775, a group of American soldiers raided George Whitefield’s five-year-old grave in Newbury, Massachusetts. Hoping that his relics would secure their protection in battle, they extracted a clerical collar and wristbands from the celebrated preacher’s remains and divided the cloth among themselves. The staunchly Protestant Whitefield no doubt rolled in his grave when they returned him to his resting place. Continue Reading »
A new survey reports that “most American evangelicals hold views condemned as heretical by... the councils of the early church.” Is a deficient understanding of sola scriptura and tradition to blame?
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Gerald McDermott has been prosecuting a case against a certain version of evangelical theology over the past few years (see here and here). His fundamental point is the need to recover the Great Tradition within Evangelicalism and thus to read scripture in and through the lens of the church spread out through time. To fail to read scripture in this way, according to McDermott, is to hold to nuda scriptura in which the interpretation of scripture is reduced to the application of current sensibilities that reinforce the autonomy of the late-modern individual. When personal interpretation trumps the tradition, McDermott wonders how one can ever move beyond a new kind of Babylonian captivity, the captivity of interpretation to a modern cultural milieu. Continue Reading »
The new president of Cedarville University, a Christian college in Ohio, has decided that no woman shall teach a man in any Biblical studies. This reflects a long-running debate within Evangelicalism (see here and here) over gender complementarianism and the role of women. To be . . . . Continue Reading »
Let’s keep Christianity weird.” So said the Southern Baptists’ official face to the nation, Russell Moore, as he closed an address on “prophetic minorities” before a thousand pastors, artists, social entrepreneurs, and assorted others at latest edition of Q. “What is Q?” you might ask like a local woman did to me as I snapped a picture of the ten-foot-tall reclaimed wood logo that stood outside a historic hall in the shadow of the Tennessee capitol building. Telling her dryly that it was a gathering of hipster Christians only seemed to add to her confusion. (I overheard someone else try to explain it as a bit like TED for evangelicals, which apparently left his native inquisitor as perplexed as mine.) Even the basics can be cloudy—every participant I asked assumed the “Q” stood for “question” but no one really knew for sure, and Q’s website holds no direct answer. Continue Reading »
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