We’re all familiar with the fire evacuation maps on the inside of a hotel room door. In a brief, succinct, and luminously clear manner, the map provides directions for evacuating the building in case of fire. Growing up, I was taught to think of the Bible as like God’s hotel fire evacuation map for the […]
Bible
Jesus, the God of Genocide, and William Barclay
William Barclay (d. 1978) is a lot like C.S. Lewis in one key respect: he was a British scholar widely read and trusted by North American evangelicals who nonetheless frequently expressed some relatively radical opinions that sailed under the radar of those same evangelicals. I was reminded of this again the other day when in […]
Is the Exodus as important to Christian belief as Jesus’ resurrection?
When I was growing up, I learned to read biblical narratives as historically reliable accounts of past events. Whether the issue was the death and resurrection of Jesus, the curious maritime journey of Jonah, the Exodus from Egypt, Samson’s killing a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, or Adam and Eve talking to […]
Hidden in Plain View: A Review
Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017). Over the last few decades, Christian apologetic defenses of the historicity of the New Testament have typically pursued a minimal facts approach according to which one seeks to establish a basic set of core claims about the life and death of […]
Who is the Fool? How Christians misread the Bible to attack atheists
This article is an excerpt from my 2015 book Is the Atheist My Neighbor? Rethinking Christian Attitudes Toward Atheism. It’s a book that J.L. Schellenberg, one of the leading atheist philosophers of religion, recommended as “brief and lively but remarkably full and acute” and “impressively fair”. You can decide whether this brief excerpt lives up to […]
Did the biblical concept of God evolve from polytheism to monotheism?
My 2013 book God or Godless (co-authored with atheist John Loftus) is a collection of twenty short debates. In ten debates I argue for a debate resolution and John argues against it. And in ten debates John argues for his own resolution and I argue against it. That’s the way it was supposed to work, anyway. But […]
Are Angels and Demons Part of an Obsolete Biblical Worldview?
In his book The Biblical Cosmos (which I just reviewed here), Robin Parry points out that the Bible is written against the backdrop of an ancient cosmology which we no longer accept in the modern world. For example, biblical writers assume a flat earth and a three-storied universe with heaven located physically above the earth. They assume […]
Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years
I grew up in a Pentecostal fundagelical church where we prided ourselves on taking Scripture seriously. That meant, among other things, a commitment to literal interpretation. From a literal six days of creation to a literal thousand year millennium, we took Scripture in what we believed to be the natural sense. And that meant reading […]
Because Jesus would build a wall, that’s why!
The base of the Statue of Liberty includes this famous poem by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Well-intentioned, perhaps. But is it really […]
“I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth…” Could God be punishing Texas?
13 So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. […] 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath […]
If this is God’s Word, why isn’t it easier to understand?
That’s the question. You can read my latest article at confusedaboutgrace.com here.
In a Heartbeat: Changing Attitudes among Christians Toward Same Sex Attraction
For years now attitudes toward homosexuality have been shifting in society generally and among Christians in particular. According to statistics published by Pew Research in 2015, significant majorities of the following Christian groups now accept the morality of homosexuality: Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Orthodox. In addition, a slight majority of “historically Black Protestants” also accept […]
Holy Hilarity: A Funny Study of Genesis: A Review
Mark Roncace. Holy Hilarity: A Funny Study of Genesis (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 2016). I was a big fan of Mark Roncace’s previous book God’s Story. I also very much enjoyed Raw Revelation (albeit with some reservations). So when he offered to send me a review copy of his latest popular study, Holy Hilarity, I welcomed the opportunity. […]
Special Pleading or Therapy? The J. Warner Wallace Dilemma
Popular Christian apologists have a problem. On the one hand, they are strident defenders of objective moral knowledge, often to the end of defending a moral argument for God’s existence. On the other hand, they defend readings of the violence portrayed in the Bible that appear inconsistent with that aforementioned commitment to objective moral knowledge. […]
