His father had died recently, and when I saw him I expressed my sympathy at his loss. “Thanks,” he said. “But actually it was pretty much a blessing. Dad had been suffering lately, and we feel that it was the right time for the Lord to take him home.” I didn’t try to correct his […]
The other day we had our annual ceremony for giving years-of-service awards to faculty and staff at Fuller. The folks who planned the service chose “abundant hospitality” as the theme, based on the Apostle’s call for us to be “good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10). It was a fine occasion for acknowledging once again...
“I’m just trying to get clear about the basic issue,” the reporter said. “You say that the basic issue between you and Rob Bell on the one side of the debate and Al Mohler on the other is that you believe that a Hindu can be saved without accepting Christ, and Al Mohler doesn’t. Isn’t that it?”
The answer is...
I have received many responses to my comments on Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins—responses both to the brief remarks by me quoted in USA Today, and to the longer piece I posted here explaining my endorsement of Rob’s book. Many of the responses were strongly positive, several also quite negative, with some others—especially the many tweets that I...
I told the USA TODAY reporter that Rob Bell’s newly released Love Wins is a fine book and that I basically agree with his theology. I knew that the book was being widely criticized for having crossed the theological bridge from evangelical orthodoxy into universalism. Not true, I told the reporter. Rob Bell is calling us away from a...
Bernie Madoff finally gave a public interview of sorts recently. Basically, he argued that bankers and others in the financial world were complicit in his crimes. I have nothing interesting to say on that subject, but the very occasion of his speaking out raised an important question for me: Who is talking these days to Bernie Madoff about the...
Occasionally I come across fellow evangelicals distancing themselves from the notion of a “preferential option for the poor.” This has been happening recently in the debates over the proposed adoption of the Belhar Confession by Reformed and Presbyterian denominations in North America. Belhar, the argument goes, espouses the “preferential option,” particularly in its affirmation “that God, in...
This is the time of year for theological reflections about the Super Bowl. One of the most stimulating discussions that I can remember on the subject was at a Reformed Journal editors meeting back in the 1970s. Someone had submitted an article alleging that the Super Bowl was an idolatrous “civil religion” rite, glorifying patriotism, militarism, consumerism and male...
The speaker at the conference was telling us about “creation care.” The Bible has some good stuff in it about the subject, he said. But there is also quite a bit of bad stuff. So we have to be careful what we choose for guidance on the subject from the pages of Scripture.
The worst part of the Bible, he...
Ernest Stoeffler was a scholar who devoted his life to the study of pietism in its many forms: Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Moravian, Puritan, Wesleyan, and the like. His magnum opus, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism, still stands as the best overall survey of pietism as an international movement. Stoeffler not only chronicled the various manifestations of pietism in great...
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