How do you become a more fruitful, effective Christian? Do we just need to buckle down, read more Bible, pray harder, and show up to church more often? That’s often what we (I) tell people to do. But if that’s all we say, it can become a soul-crushing, joyless works-righteousness that kills our desire for […]
Read more "Peter’s Path to Progress"You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you should judge a book by its purpose. Some books are meant to be read for fun; I devoured the Hardy Boys detective novels as a kid. Some books are meant to be used as guides; I used the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to look up the meaning of the word “colophon” […]
Read more "How to Read the Book"“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Matthew 4:1 What was it like for Jesus, in the wilderness, while he was tempted by Satan? Was it easy for him? Was it difficult for him? Could Jesus have sinned if he wanted to? Before you roll […]
Read more "The God-Man in the Desert"“I Can’t Trust the Bible” That statement, or some version of it, is one of the major reasons why people either reject Christianity, refashion it to suit their tastes, or leave the whole concept of “religion” in the realm of comfortable incomprehensibility. But with Easter just behind us, this question comes into sharp focus. The […]
Read more "Can You Trust the Bible?"The complex, allusive imagery and controversial interpretations of apocalyptic literature can turn the task of understanding it into a terrifying beast of three heads and a multitude of wings. However, even with his biases, Collins largely accomplishes his thesis and creates a useful generic paradigm through which this body of literature can be read.
Read more "Review: Apocalyptic Imagination by John Collins"Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is. 1 John 3:2 What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Was it a flaming sunset over a pristine lake? […]
Read more "A Taste for Eternity"Deacons are like gorilla glue for the church. They help hold it together, to shore up weak spots, so the church can be everything God made it to be.
Read more "God’s Gorilla Glue"The point of knowing Scripture is to know God – this is the starting point for Daniel Treier’s work to describe and guide Theological Interpretation of Scripture (henceforth TIS)… In what follows, I’ll do my best to give a brief overview of the book and my thoughts about it.
Read more "Bringing the Book Back to its People"The Bible tells us that Jesus loves us. But the Bible is a really big book! The one sitting in front of me has 1,316 pages, each of which has two columns of words in small type. The Bible is also a really complicated book – it’s actually 66 books, written by over two dozen authors, over thousands of years, in multiple languages. We believe that God has given us this book as his true word, but how do you begin to make sense of a book like this?
Read more "Promises, Patterns, and Harmony"
Cade Patterson 