On Genesis 17
Some years ago, Dennis came to my office to talk about how his study of the Bible had reshaped his understanding of God. He related an episode in his life just a few years earlier involving the purchase of a swing set for his young daughter. His church background had emphasized the sovereignty of God, including the notion that God’s
Continue reading The Sovereignty of God and the Sears Catalog
In the previous entry in this blog, I argued that the most profitable approach to reading prophetic literature involves a variety of “pattern recognition.” Yesterday, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, I took the opportunity to re-read Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” his famed “I Have a Dream” speech, and the concluding chapter of his
The Danger of Genre Confusion
During the initial days of the First Gulf War, several local news outlets contacted me wanting to know whether events in the Persian Gulf were fulfilling biblical prophecies against Babylon. I am sure that they expected the Baptist Old Testament professor at the local college to detail an apocalyptic panorama for them. Instead, I told them, simply,
The early church affirmed the canonical authority of the Old Testament over the objections raised by some (Marcion, for example) that its focus on covenant-keeping (works legalism) and its portrayal of an “angry,” “violent” God do not comport with the Gospel’s message of grace and love. Nonetheless, the history of the church’s relationship
“The chief end of [humankind] is to glorify God.”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism
Readers of the Bible will recognize the title of this entry as a paraphrase of Genesis 1:26, the statement of God’s intention to create humankind. The paraphrase echoes a position often taken by critics of religion (Sigmund Freud, and more recently Christopher Kitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others), namely, that human beings simply project a super-human
Continue reading Let us make God in our image and according to our likeness
Christmas disturbs me this year. Usually, I hear in the Christmas story the announcement that the prophetic insight encapsulated in the phrase “Immanu-el (Hebrew, “God is with us”; Isa 7:14; Matt 1:23) has found ultimate expression in the birth of a child. Christmas usually reminds me that God wants communion with human beings, created in God’s image, to such a degree that God was willing come to us as an infant child. Christmas usually reminds me that we do not have to speculate about the character of the God, mysterious and majestic, who created the universe. Instead, God so desires to reveal