Last spring I posted a piece criticizing the proposed adoption of the Belhar Confession as a confessional document by some Reformed and Presbyterian churches in North America. I received a lot of criticism for my position on the subject. And the criticisms came from many good friends who saw my blog posting as a betrayal […]
In his latest Newsweek column, Fareed Zakaria discusses the views of people who think that President Obama’s call for a new global cooperation on nucelar disarmament is futile, even silly. As Zakaria characterizes this viewpoint, it assumes that nations like Russia and China are too self-interested ever to find genuine common ground. To ask them genuinely to...
Someone wrote this week to ask me for the reference for a story he heard me tell a few years ago in my address at a Fuller Commencement ceremony. If having other speakers wanting to use a story from one of your speeches is a sign that you got your point across, then this particular story is a winner....
There is a Bavinck revival going on in some theological circles in North America. Well maybe not exactly a re-vival, since we would have had to have a “vival” at one time in order to “re-“ it now. To be sure, Herman Bavinck has always been an honored name in the Dutch Calvinist community here. But up...
There was no room at the inn when we tried to make a reservation in mid-August in Forks, Washington-not at the Quality Suites Inn, nor any other motel or B&B in the immediate area. The big draw in Forks these days is the "Twilight" phenomenon. Stepahanie Meyer chose to use Forks as the fictional setting for her...
Jackie Stone is very angry at Bernie Madoff, and I don’t blame her. She and her whole extended family—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins—face an uncertain financial future because they had invested everything with Madoff, and it is now all lost. Jackie is not satisfied with the court’s decision to sentence the investor to 150 years in prison....
I am writing an essay on Carl Henry’s ecclesiology, for the Evangelical Theological Society meetings in November, and have just finished reading his 1986 autobiography, Confessions of a Theologian. I was especially taken with the relatively pessimistic tone of his concluding reflections on the state of evangelicalism. Much of what he says sounds familiar—not unlike some recently...
I am writing this from Turkey, where we have been helping to lead a tour focusing on Paul’s missionary journeys. This has been more of a learning experience than a teaching one, which is what I expected when I took on the assignment. Nor was I disappointed in my desire to view a Muslim culture up close....
A group of us from several seminaries were meeting together, and someone made a comparison between Fuller Seminary and another theological school. Someone else quickly chimed in with the observation that the comparison did not quite work because, he said, “Fuller is a movement school,” while the other seminary serves a specific denomination. I understood the point,...
At a student party during my graduate school days, I had a fascinating discussion with a coleopterist. He did not use that label to describe himself in our conversation; he simply identified himself as a doctoral student in the field of entomology. But recently I read an article in the Los Angeles Times that informed me that...
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