James W. Skillen, The Good of Politics: A Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Introduction. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014. $22.99 A welcome addition to Baker Academic’s “Engaging Culture” series, James Skillen’s The Good of Politics offers an accessible, probing introduction to…
Who likes a complainer? Complainers are unsettling to be around. Holiday meals ruined by laborious and endless complaints about how life has shortchanged them – the car that broke down too early, the college that should have given admission, the…
I have decided to go see the movie American Sniper because by all accounts it thoughtfully delves into the moral contours of warfare and killing. Whether we prefer to acknowledge it or not, our society has been at war for…
Well, if I thought it was bad when I exposed a few less-well-known things about John Wesley, that’s nothing compared to what happens when you touch the sacred shibboleths of Owenian Baptists! There was a bit of a social media…
The internet world exploded earlier this month when South Carolina mega-pastor Perry Noble informed his attendees that the Ten Commandments are not commandments after all but promises. Noble gleaned this insight not from a careful study of the Scriptures –…
The details of the story are fairly well known: Noah’s descendants, still within Noah’s lifetime (by Calvin’s reckoning), pooled their various talents and employed their common tongue towards the end of building a really big tower. God, unimpressed by their…
How many baptisms upon profession of faith have you administered or seen? I asked my church, as well as fellow pastors and ruling elders in the PCA, the same question. Overall, the answer was, ‘very few.’ Now, one of the…
Swedish archeologists working near Gadol Eshed Nahar in Midwestern Palestine have discovered what seems to be conclusive textual evidence of the existence of Q. Scholars of early Christianity have long regarded Q–an abbreviation for “Quelle” (a German term which means…
I remember once telling a friend at church that I was going to go do a PhD on John Owen. They replied, “Oh yes, I know him. He’s that great Baptist theologian.” Somewhat startled, I thought I’d since made this…
The Westminster Shorter Catechism on Q. & A. is wrong-headed, in my view. Almost everyone in Reformed circles knows the following question and answer by heart: Q. 1. What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is…
