The Crawl Space Under the Neutral Zone

The next chapter of Dawkins’ book concerns the arguments for God’s existence. He addresses, in turn, the traditional Thomist arguments, the ontological argument, the aesthetic argument, the argument from personal experience, the argument from Scripture, the argument from admired religious scientists, Pascal’s wager, and a Bayesian argument involving probability calculations. Not surprisingly, since Dawkins is …

Preaching to No One in Particular

Ministers and preachers have a dangerous tendency to emphasize timeless truths to such an extent that they wind up preaching to no one in particular. And yet the letters to the Ephesians, Galatians, Corinthians and Romans are quite different — this is because their respectively different stories require that that God’s eternal Word be brought …

Secularism, Reformism, Fundamentalism

“Searching for answers to escape from this dilemma, Muslims have developed three major responses: secularism, reformism, and fundamentalism. Secularism holds that Muslims can only advance by emulating the West . . . Reformism, which offers a murky middle, is very popular. Whereas secularism forthrightly calls for learning from the West, reformism sneakily appropriates from it …

Uphill From Here

I thoroughly enjoyed the next chapter in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry. This was the chapter by S.M. Baugh, and was entitled “The New Perspective, Mediation, and Justification.” In it he tackled the central confusion of E.P. Sanders, along with some of the resultant muddles, and does an effective job with it. One particular thing …