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A Minneapolis pastor named Jonathan Parnell is offering tips on being a friend of sinners. He believes it’s a good thing to be. John MacArthur riffed on the “friend of sinners” idea in a 1980 sermon. He liked it too. A church in Milwaukee identifies with the concept so much that it has taken the name. “Friend of Sinners Church” offers a free breakfast followed by a worship service each Sunday.
So was Jesus a friend of sinners? Should we be? Well, yes and no.
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Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason is trying to clear up confusion on the subject of humility in a recent post.
He’s responding to a preacher’s comment that “Humility is the one virtue that if you think you have it, you don’t.” He thinks that’s a mistaken notion, in that it’s both disheartening and textually inaccurate.
Let’s see if Greg’s reasoning stands up …
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The purpose of this series is to show how conclusions drawn from an isolated proof text may lead you astray theologically. Today’s post illustrates just how far this can go when you add unsupported supposition to supposition. The result is the theological equivalent of a house of cards. By the time you work your way up to the attic, you find yourself asking questions for which there cannot possibly be any definitive answers.
The remedy is to say, “Let me think about that some more” way back in the basement, where there’s still a chance to construct a solid foundation for future inquiry.
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“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
Have you ever played Telephone Tag? (Maybe where you grew up people called it Broken Telephone or Chinese Whispers.) It’s a game played sitting in a circle. It begins when someone outside the circle whispers a sentence to a person selected at random, who then whispers it to the person on his right. The message continues around the circle until it reaches the person sitting to the left of the original starting point, who then declares aloud what he thinks he heard.
If the circle is large enough, you’ll frequently find the product of the exercise bears little resemblance to the original message.
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Refunds generated by charitable donations documented on tax returns have always been a source of disagreement between believers. The churches I attended growing up were so determined to do their giving on the sly that they practiced something informally referred to as the “brethren handshake”, in which a little envelope full of cash was passed from hand to hand under cover of the traditional greeting.
It wasn’t as hard to detect as they thought, but you have to give them points for trying.
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Judd is writing a letter to the editor at one of his frequently visited websites. He finds it suboptimal that despite “signaling moderate distaste” for Donald Trump, its editor would actually consider voting for the man should he run for president in the 2024 election. Judd’s counterproposal is that the Republican Party seek out a candidate who epitomizes biblical values rather than a divisive individual sporting a well-acknowledged plethora of warts and wrinkles.
By way of correction, Judd offers a familiar proverb. To his mind, the teaching of scripture should be conclusive: “When a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.”
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“Then they turned back and came to
The passage quoted above is from Genesis 14. It describes the actions of four kings who fought with five other kings in the valley of Siddim in the land of Canaan, where Abraham lived. Battles were going on around the patriarch as he pitched his tent in the land God had promised him, and Abraham, it seems, generally kept as far away from these as he could.
In this case, his relative Lot lived in Sodom, which had been pillaged in the conflict. With family involved, Abraham couldn’t morally stay out of it.
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Grammarly.com says, “A straw man argument is a logical fallacy in which an arguer distorts an opposing point of view and misrepresents it … creating the impression of refuting an argument rather than addressing or refuting it.” That’s as good a definition as any, and will do for our purposes.
Rick Warren is a Southern Baptist pastor and author who has become one of the most influential evangelicals of our day. He is also very well acquainted with the straw man argument, though he probably doesn’t put that on his resume.
At the age of 69, after a lifetime teaching the Bible, Rick Warren has finally decided the Lord always intended women to teach in church. This is absolutely not, Warren says, based on culture or anecdotes or outside pressure, but based on the Bible.
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Earlier this month Josh Butler wrote a post called “Sex Won’t Save You” for the Gospel Coalition site that stirred up something of a ruckus. The link above is to an archived version; yes, the ruckus was sufficient to get it deleted, to cause Butler to resign from his position as a fellow with the Keller Center, and to cancel his appearance at an upcoming Gospel Coalition event. Such are the times in which we live.
The status of Butler’s forthcoming Multnomah book Beautiful Union, from which the article was an excerpt, should probably be regarded as “formerly forthcoming”, at least from its original publisher.
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Reading the Bible regularly, repeatedly and without an agenda is a great safeguard against monomania.
Stephen G. Fowler is a medical doctor and student of psychoanalysis. I will probably have more to say about his 2017 book Probing the Mind to Free the Soul in a future post, but my interest today has more to do with his interpretation of a particular proverb than his subject matter or technical arguments.
Let’s just say his reading of the text may be more than a little influenced by his preoccupation with psychoanalysis.
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The website universalsalvation.org was an outreach of the UK-based Christianworld Church headed by the late Tony Sharpe that published occasional posts promoting the doctrine of Universalism after Sharpe’s death from a failed heart surgery in June 2004 until some time in 2016. The website does not specifically credit the articles there to Sharpe, but they appear to represent his views on scripture.
Like many other defunct websites, we only find Universal Salvation in The Wayback Machine’s archives. I can think of several possible reasons it is no longer active: (1) the church disbanded; (2) the person who maintained the blog died, as will happen to us all at one point, and subsequently discovered his beliefs did not represent reality; or (3) the person who maintained the blog discovered his error in this life and deleted it (we can only hope).
Either way, we don’t need to caution anybody at Universal Salvation about proof-texting. The same cannot be said for its former readers.
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One of my seven “sniff tests” for heresy is that an author strings together impressive lists of verses unquoted and out of context, but a closer look shows most or all have nothing to do with the points they are alleged to support. Paul Ellis’s The Silent Queen serves as a great example of this technique, and I promised to do a second post examining his “evidence” that the Christians of the New Testament permitted women to participate in church meetings in exactly the same ways men did, and that Paul taught this as normative.
That’s the context here.
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Ray Greenley expects to be judged before the great white throne described for us in Revelation 20. He writes:
“All roads ultimately lead to the great white throne judgment, where each of us must stand before Jesus in all of His power and splendor and give account for all of our deeds.”
Greenley is not an outlier in this respect. GotQuestions notes that other Christians believe “the great white throne judgment in Revelation 20:11-15 will be the time that believers and unbelievers alike are judged”.
Personally, I don’t think all roads ultimately lead to the great white throne. It is a common assumption, and it certainly simplifies the judgment question, but it is impossible to make a good case for this from anywhere in scripture, least of all Revelation 20.
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Does the Bible allow for divorce in the case of adultery? John Piper doesn’t think so, and he makes his case here. Naturally, it hinges on his interpretation of the Lord’s two comments on the subject in Matthew, which we find in 5:32 and 19:9. Here’s the longer version from chapter 5:
“But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Most Christians consider that the words in bold italic constitute an exception (the word “except” is our first clue). To Mr. Piper they do not.
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“I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”
Do the souls of aborted babies go to heaven? Do babies and children go to heaven when they die? These are questions of deep concern both to believers and even to the occasional agnostic, who might be willing to risk finding him- or herself before the great white throne one day, but not their children.
And yes, people like this do exist. I know one.
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“If you ask anything in my name, I will do it.”
Olympic hurdler and bobsledder Lolo Jones wants a godly husband, and she’s been asking God for one. So far, no success.
“Where are you God?” she wrote recently on Instagram. “Your word says John 14:14. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. I’m asking God to please honor the desire of my heart. Your word says two are better than one. Ecc 4:9-12”
“Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
New believers seeking to understand scripture for themselves with the aid of Google and/or an online concordance may be forgiven for throwing up their hands in despair when they encounter verses like this one. There are at least three major schools of thought about Luke 17:33, and multiple variations within each.
Nevertheless, even in passages like this where there are genuine questions about what exactly the Lord was telling his disciples, some interpretations remain more logical, careful and likely than others.
Learning to love yourself is not the greatest love of all, but you wouldn’t know that if you ask non-trivial numbers of evangelical Christians:
Each of these assertions depends on a linguistically-indefensible interpretation of a familiar statement made by the Lord Jesus.
In our early twenties, my cousin and I would get together once a week or so to study the Bible and debate theology. Our discussions were mostly amiable but a little frustrating for both of us. Because we attended churches that held very different views about the meaning of Bible prophecy and the future prospects of God’s earthly people, our underlying assumptions about the meaning of the texts we studied together were sharply at odds far too frequently for comfort.
One regular bone of contention was the meaning of the word “Israel”. My cuz used it figuratively, I used it literally, and back and forth we went. We never did resolve our debate. Funnily enough, I am still thrashing this out on a regular basis, just with different people.
And ... here it is again.
