I was intrigued when I saw Paul Maxwell’s book The Trauma of Doctrine about to launch, particularly for the subtitle of “New Calvinism, Religious Abuse, and the Experience of God.” I have interacted with a lot of Reformed writers and sources, and while I wouldn’t term myself a Calvinist (nor would they likely claim me) I regard Calvinism and Reformed theology as something every student of theology must engage with. It’s simply too important historically…
Culture can be an imperious force In the previous two posts I put forth the idea that music has didactic power quite apart from any words we may add, and that music has idioms, syntax and semantics that work in similar ways to language. To conclude, I want to consider more concrete ways in which culture is at work here. While musical sounds may in themselves be neither moral nor immoral, the culture has provided…
Idiom, syntax, and semantics work in music as well as words. (Part 2 in a series on the didactic power of music.) Far from being a universal language, music in its disparate forms is rather a polyglot that makes communication even between those in the same house sometimes difficult. Parents do not understand or do not like the music their children are listening to, and this has created some of the conflict which Ron Powers…
It’s the music itself that’s teaching us. Music is very much a part of the worship life of any gathering of Christians. It is an important component in our offering of adoration to God. The Bible repeatedly invokes music in praise of God, and among the many references we could cite, one of the better known is the command given in Ephesians. “Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and…
There have always been some in church history who affirmed universalism, the view that all of humanity will ultimately be saved. Origen believed even the devil would finally be reconciled. More recently, David Bentley Hart has offered an apology for universalism in his recent book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. Hart’s book is polemical, for which I fault him not in the least. The topic is such that it is…
One of the challenges for Christians today in reading the Hebrew Bible is to discern what is applicable to us, and what is not. Indeed, when I posted the question of the meaning of chapter Leviticus 11 on social media, (the chapter which details the clean and unclean animals) I received a variety of responses. These ranged from “We need to observe these distinctions and not eat what God says not to eat.” Others suggested…
The book of Judges is a book that some common Sunday school material is taken from. Samson and his feats of strength are popular. Or, Gideon and his defeat of the Midianites, after God graciously gave him confidence through the incident with the fleece. And, perhaps every 8-year-old boy’s favorite “Now Eglon was a very fat man.”(3:17) But there are many parts of the book that get sanitized or left out. But the book, strange…
In the wake of recent events in the United States, several have suggested that dispensational theology is at the root of an embrace of Christian nationalism. Few offer any substantive evidence beyond the charge, however. I want to offer three reasons I think this claim is inaccurate. 1) A misunderstanding of the distinctives of dispensationalism. 2) A failure to see that in church history, there has been far more symbiosis between covenant theology and seeing…
Suggestions for combatants At the remove of many centuries after the apostolic era, we have not just competing voices stating what is true and false, we have whole choruses, antiphonally arrayed. The Reformation is, by some accounts, one of the most significant historical events for the Western world. It is not difficult to see how that is the case. Out of the Reformation came a surge of theologizing; believers who sifted and weighed the evidence…
Theories of atonement are several. Sometimes they overlap, i.e., there is certainly victory in the penal substitutionary death of Christ. But various atonement theories are opposed to one another and irreconcilable. Whether they are irreconcilable with one another is of less concern than whether Scripture supports them. One also has to be careful to note that quite often, people hold to elements from more than one theory, to parts of a theory but not the…