Open up your trusty King James Bible, turn to 1 John 5:7, and read: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” For many centuries this verse provided a powerful, eloquent, and theologically rich summary of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, […]
Podcast-The Tentative Apologist
86. Making Sense of the Incarnation: A Conversation with Timothy Pawl
In 1977 John Hick published The Myth of God Incarnate, an edited collection of essays by leading scholars which fell like a bomb on the playground of British theology. The objections to the incarnation presented by the contributors to that book were many, but perhaps the most incisive was presented by Hick himself as he railed […]
85. No Easy Answers: Kelly Kapic on God, theology, and suffering
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” So go the words of the Celebrant in the Ash Wednesday service that initiates the season of Lent. Dust we may be, but we are dust that thinks, dust that knows, dust that feels. We are dust that suffers as it is forced to grapple with […]
84. Is belief in God rational? A Christian and atheist in debate
The existence of God is one of the perennial questions of philosophical inquiry. Indeed, in the minds of many, it is the very greatest question one can ask. But not everyone agrees. While the existence of God may have long occupied the spotlight, the critics believe that that time is past. The time has now come […]
83. God’s Story: A Conversation with Mark Roncace
When I was growing up in the church, my earliest encounters with the Bible came in the terms of the Sunday school flannelgraph, a rather primitive technology in which Bible stories were acted out with pieces of fabric stuck to a felt board. At that time, the Bible seemed like a disjointed set of isolated stories, each […]
82. Is the Church Making Us Stupid? A conversation with John Stackhouse
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” And so begins Mark Noll’s 1994 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It’s been twenty-two years since Noll shot that provocative salvo across the bow of conservative Christian subculture. So how are we doing now? At first blush, […]
81. Robin Parry on the Biblical Cosmos
In 1993 I spent a summer teaching English in Japan. It was an unforgettable and somewhat unsettling litany of new discoveries: they drove on the wrong side of the road; they wore slippers indoors; and at night they slept on the floor on futons. For goodness sake, they even slurped their noodles at the table. […]
80. The Problem with Porn: A conversation with Matt Fradd
We live in a world where Abercrombie and Fitch sell padded bras for eight year olds, where b-movie stars build their careers by tweeting demeaning selfies to their legions of voyeuristic knuckle dragging fans, and where an adjective like “sexy” is now used to describe everything from sports cars to sermon titles. In short, ours is […]
79. Bringing the Gospel to the poorest nation on earth
What does it mean to proclaim the Gospel? What’s that supposed to look like? Many evangelical Christians tend to think of evangelistic proclamation as proselytizing, a declaration of a set of truth claims about Jesus. While Gospel proclamation obviously includes words, this is surely only part of the message. As Ronald Sider noted some years […]
78. Hugh Ross on God, Science, and Reasons to Believe
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously proposed three so-called laws that memorably capture the wonder of scientific advance. According to the third law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If that’s true, science has made the world a truly magical place. And it is true. Just think how an iPhone would appear […]
77. Kenton L. Sparks on the Bible as Sacred and Broken Word
According to historic Christianity, the Bible is the inspired Word of God. But what does it mean to confess the Bible as inspired, as “the Word of God”? Like many Christians, growing up in the Church I was taught that the various books of the Bible were produced by the Holy Spirit acting in history […]
76. Keith L. Johnson on Theology as Discipleship
Theologian William Placher once made the following observation: “Several times, introducing me to a church group, a well-meaning person has said, ‘Bill Placher is a theologian, but I think you’ll find what he has to say very interesting.’ That but always worries me, yet it captures something honest about contemporary attitudes to Christian theology.” I […]
75. Allan Effa on Religious Pilgrimage
Today the idea of pilgrimage seems strange to many of us. But it was not always so. Pilgrimage used to be a common part of life as Christians sought spiritual renewal, a closer walk with God, and perhaps some time off in purgatory along the way. And even long after Protestants had set aside the […]
74. The Problem with Jebus
One of the oft-noted traits of the New Atheism is a new hostility and contempt toward those of differing opinion. In this episode of The Tentative Apologist Podcast I address this troubling trait with respect to the specific convention of referring to Jesus Christ as “Jebus”. I begin by tracing the origins of this convention. […]
