Bible, Theology & Philosophy

My parents used to send me to camp in the summer. That camp had a preoccupation with cabin cleanliness. Every day, the campers from the cleanest cabin were given special prizes and privileges. Naturally, the campers in my cabin wanted to win, so we cleaned the cabin scrupulously every morning.

The Perspicuity of Scripture

I’ve always enjoyed secret codes. As a fourth-grader, I remember creating secret alphabets made of code to utilize in “top secret” communication between me and my friends. There was a great sense of satisfaction in decrypting one of our codes and reading the covert message. Like many other childhood adventures, secret codes faded from my interest over time.

There once was a man who loved soup. So fond was he of soup that he decided to devote his meals entirely to the concoction. Soup, he reasoned, could supply him with every nutrient that he needed. So he forbade his wife to set anything on the table except soup. “Sola Suppa” was his motto.

BP News is the official press of the Southern Baptist Convention. In a recent “First‐Person” article (August 23, 2006), Albert Mohler issued “A Call for Theological Triage and Christian Maturity.” The article, which has been posted twice on Mohler’s own blog, reiterates an argument that he has repeated in several venues. It is an important argument, and Mohler expresses it thoughtfully.

The ground squirrel never knew what hit him. He had gone exploring in our Neon’s engine compartment and met his end in the serpentine belt when my wife started the car on her way to pick me up from work. She heard the belt go. My father-in-law very graciously picked me up from work, brought me by Advanced Auto for a new belt, and helped install it. This was a good thing because, when they passed out mechanical skills in heaven, I must have been in the library; my father-in-law, on the other hand, has done a lot of his own auto repair.

Few passages of Scripture are more popular among contemporary Christians than 1 Corinthians 9:19‐23. Especially fashionable is Paul’s line in verse 22 about becoming “all things to all men.” This passage is commonly taken to mean that effective evangelism requires Christians to imitate the people around them. Many evangelicals cannot even imagine this interpretation being mistaken.

The heresy in Colosse was an odd mixture. On the one hand, it contained elements of incipient Gnosticism. Apparently the Colossians were talking about Gnostic categories like Sophia, Gnosis, Eons, and the Pleroma. On the other hand, this heresy also contained Judaizing elements, primarily evidenced by an effort to introduce Old Testament forms into the New Testament worship.