I slumped in an unpadded pew, half-listening to the morning Bible study. I wasn’t particularly interested in what the Bible teacher in this small Christian high school had to say. But, when the teacher commented that the Gospels always reported word-for-word what Jesus said, I perked up and lifted my hand. This statement brought […]
[Read More...]Proclamation: “Don’t Worry. I Read the Book. He Doesn’t Stay Dead.”
One rule in our household is that, if a book is turned into a movie, everyone must read the book before watching the movie. Our oldest daughter was eight years old when C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was turned into a feature film. In the weeks leading up to the movie’s […]
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Apologetics: What Are the Chances That Jesus’ Body Was Left On the Cross?
:: The Obscenity of the Cross in the Ancient World :: With few exceptions, even the most skeptical scholars admit that Jesus was crucified—and with good reason. Not only Christian authors but also the Roman historian Tacitus mention the crucifixion of Jesus. It’s highly unlikely that first-century Christians would have fabricated such a shameful fate […]
[Read More...]Apologetics: Why the Acts of Paul and Gospel of Peter Aren’t On Your Schedule for Reading the Bible in a Year
Perhaps you, like many others, are planning to read through the Bible this year. If you do, you’re likely to ask yourself at some point, “Weren’t there other Gospels and letters that didn’t make it into the Bible? Why am I reading these texts instead of those?” So what about those other Gospels? Well, from […]
[Read More...]Apologetics: Why Some Books Made It Into the New Testament and Others Didn’t
It’s New Year’s Eve! Tomorrow, many of you will begin reading through the Bible in a year. Before you do, I want to plant a question in your mind: Why these books? Why spend the year reading through these ancient texts and not some other documents? What’s so important about these books that owe their […]
[Read More...]Church History: How Did Christians Decide Which Books Belonged in the New Testament?
Video courtesy of Christianity.com To learn more about how Christians determined which texts were true and authoritative, read these articles: Who Decided Which Books Belong in My Bible? and Why No Baptized Lions or Talking Crosses Made It Into Your Bible. 30 Days through Church History: Day 8
[Read More...]Church History: Who Were the Gnostics and What About Their Gospels?
Video courtesy of Christianity.com To learn even more about the Gnostics and other challenges to second-century Christians, read these four brief articles from Ligonier Ministries: * Montanism * Gnosticism * Marcion’s Challenge * Irenaeus of Lyons 30 Days through Church History: Day 7
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Church History: What Happened after the Apostles Died?
By the end of the first century, Roman persecutions were dogging God’s people from the outside, and false teachings from people who claimed to be Christians were hounding the church from within. The Ebionites said that Jesus was a human Messiah but not the divine Lord. Most Gnostics, on the other hand, depicted Jesus as […]
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Church History: Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Have Anything to Do with Jesus and the Early Church?
Near the northwest corner of the Dead Sea, there is a long-deserted settlement known as Qumran. Here, it appears that a discontented Jewish sect maintained a thriving religious community in the second century B.C. and again in the first century A.D. At one point, this community’s library contained more than a thousand sacred scrolls. Some […]
[Read More...]Church History: Do Any Ancient Historians Mention Jesus?
Video courtesy of Christianity.com To dig deeper into ancient historians’ references to Jesus, take a look at this chapter from Gary Habermas. 30 Days through Church History: Day 2
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Why No Baptized Lions Or Talking Crosses Made It Into Your Bible
From the first century forward, Christians viewed testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus as uniquely authoritative. The logic of this standard was simple: The people most likely to know the truth about Jesus were either eyewitnesses who had encountered Jesus personally or close associates of these witnesses. So, although Christians wrangled for […]
[Read More...]G.K. Chesterton on the Historical Case for the Resurrection
The historical case for the Resurrection is that everybody else, except the Apostles, had every possible motive to declare what they had done with the body, if anything had been done with it. The Apostles might have hidden it in order to announce a sham miracle, but it is very difficult to imagine men being […]
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Theology: What I Love About the Resurrection
I have believed in the resurrection of Jesus for many years. Over the past seven months, I have grown to love the truth of the resurrection like never before. On a summer Sunday eight months ago, my mother called to let me know that my father had collapsed that morning. A few weeks after that […]
[Read More...]N.T. Wright on Why Resurrection Makes the Best Sense of the Historical Evidence
It will not do … to say that Jesus’ disciples were so stunned and shocked by his death, so unable to come to terms with it, that they projected their shattered hopes onto the screen of fantasy and invented the idea of Jesus’ ‘resurrection’ as a way of coping with a cruelly broken dream. That […]
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“Don’t Worry. I Read the Book. He Doesn’t Stay Dead.”
One rule in our household is that, if a book is turned into a movie, everyone must read the book before watching the movie. Our oldest daughter was eight years old when C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was turned into a feature film. In the weeks leading up to the movie’s […]
[Read More...]
Apologetics: Gospel-Centered Apologetics
So much can depend on the answer to a single question. “Will you marry me?” “Did he get the job?” “Was I accepted into the program?” “Did she survive?” “Will you forgive me?” Sometimes, everything comes together—or falls apart—in the shadow of a single question. The Christian faith is that way. In the case of […]
[Read More...]Apologetics: Is It Possible that Jesus’ Body Was Left on the Cross?
The Obscenity of the Cross in the Ancient World With few exceptions, even the most skeptical scholars admit that Jesus was crucified—and with good reason. Not only Christian authors but also the Roman historian Tacitus mention the crucifixion of Jesus. It’s highly unlikely that first-century Christians would have fabricated such a shameful fate for […]
[Read More...]
The Value of a Life in Panem: A Review of The Hunger Games
“The future shape of the world,” Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler has noted, “appears to be a worldview competition between Christianity, Islam, and Western secularism.” The Hunger Games film and books present us with a world where the worldview competition is over in North America, and Western secularism has won. Centuries in the future, the […]
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