Parchment & Pen Blog

Charles L. Quarles of Louisiana College has a lengthy review of Michael R. Licona’s book The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010) in the newest issue, which I just received in yesterday’s mail, of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 54, 4 (Dec. 2011): 839-44. Although the [...]

My post this weekend about embracing doubt has stirred up quite a few people. The truth is that the post started and ended as an encouragement for us not to approach our studies with the intent of confirming our prejudice. In order for true learning to take place we have to be willing to change. [...]

Oxymoron means “sharp dullness.” It describes a figure of speech in which two words that are contradictory are put together. For example, “accurate rumors” is an oxymoron. Why? Because by definition, a rumor is not yet deemed to be accurate. Other examples could include: “insane logic,” “public secret,” “instant classic,” or my favorite, “government intelligence.” [...]

PDF We Evangelicals talk a lot about essentials and non-essentials. Rightly so. We talk about distinguishing between those areas in our faith – those doctrines – which are central or “cardinal” doctrines, and those which are not so important. However, we often have trouble when someone asks us to define, distinguish, and defend this whole “essentials/non-essentials” distinction. [...]

Jeffrey Bingham, the chair of the theology department at Dallas Theological Seminary, has a phrase he uses when people advocate something that is not a part of the historic Christian faith: “It’s something, but it’s not Christian.” More and more lately I have been asking this question: When do we, in our zeal to remove [...]

Defining terms. You know what they say: whenever you are losing an argument, just stop and require your opponent to define their terms ad infinitum. That way the argument gets lost in the hopeless idea that all you are doing is talking past each other. It is a dirty move in debate, but, in reality, we [...]

(by Lisa Robinson) In the wake of the Bell debacle, Tim Challies has written an excellent article here about three notable observations.  Overall, I agree with his assessment that the Evangelical world has become too mealy on truth rooted in the historic Christian faith.  He challenges the notion that doubt, opaqueness and unanswered questions have [...]

Again, from Jeff Young, RMM Board Member. I think the “official” definition of a mega-church is any church with over 2000 members. Click here for a complete list

The following horse and water illustration that follows is taken from Millard Erickson’s book Postmodernizing the Faith. I use this and expand on it. How should Christians engage a post-Christian, post-evangelical world, suspicious generation of people? How do we engage postmoderns? Follow me here through this “Leading a horse to water” illustration. Here are the [...]

We Evangelicals talk a lot about essentials and non-essentials. Rightly so. We talk about distinguishing between those areas in our faith—those doctrines—which are central or “cardinal” doctrines, and those which are not so important. However, we often have trouble when someone asks us to define, distinguish, and defend this whole “essentials/non-essentials” distinction. Evangelicals: We can and we [...]