Gen 6:9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. I don’t know that I have ever heard a Calvinist truly challenged regarding all the Old Testament references to righteous individuals. If all humans are totally depraved, steeped in Adam’s guilt and born into sin, how can the Bible ever describe any human being as being “righteous”, “blameless”, or “walking with God”? But Noah is clearly described that way. Twice. And he manages to maintain his righteousness even as everyone around him is on the broad path to destruction.…

Since I became aware of The Bible Project a year ago, my admiration for the work and the people behind it has only grown exponentially.  If you aren’t familiar with The Bible Project, it is a free online collection of videos, podcasts, articles and other resources designed “to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus.” Dr. Tim Mackie is the scholar behind the information shared – and that information can range from foundational to obscure but it’s always in-depth and fascinating.  The Bible Project’s home base is bibleproject.com, but the podcasts can be found everywhere…

I was listening to a Chris Williamson podcast today and he put a label to an all too common phenomenon which reeks havoc on relationships. He calls it “speaking in shadow sentences”.  Williamson illustrates the concept with this scenario: You’ve been dating someone and you haven’t spent time together for a week and you ask what they are doing tonight and they reply that they are hanging out with friends.  What you want to say is, “I really would like to see you soon and it makes me worried when you spend time with your friends but not with me…

The power went out at the church this morning in the middle of our Breakfast Club Bible study. It was about 9:00.  By 10:00 everyone had left and I had the chance to investigate. It wasn’t a single breaker or fuse – the whole church had gone primitive. It was a perfect summer morning – blue skies, no storms. No branches had fallen on any wires. No transformer had exploded.  Since the day was bright and I couldn’t just look down the street for darkened windows to judge if neighbors were also without power, I decided the only way to…

When I listen to the hardcore proponents of original sin – the Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” types – what really strikes me is the hyper focus on man’s utter sinfulness to the exclusion of all other considerations.  They stress that humans are “God haters” and that God has every right to condemn sinners to hell for their affront to His glory and justice and righteousness, but I almost never hear them speak of the pain which we inflict on each other with our sin.  Every sinner you encounter in this life isn’t merely a…

I listened to a podcast today while doing yardwork. It was a panel of 3 Calvinists and they all agreed that what I intend to preach tomorrow morning is heresy: I think it best to reject the doctrine of original sin as being unbiblical. If you’re not familiar, original sin teaches These three men would not only declare me heretical, but heretical in the first degree. The saying goes that “there are heresies and then there are damnable heresies”. They agreed that rejecting original sin is a damnable heresy because it then interferes with other key doctrines at the heart…

If I can’t put it into my own words, then I don’t really understand it. When I was teaching high school English, one of the ways I could spot plagiarism in a research paper was when a student started using words outside his normal vocabulary, typically in service of explaining some concept that I knew was beyond his understanding.  The student had found a good source and had somehow recognized the importance of the information on a gut level, but didn’t really understand the point being made well enough to “put it into his own words”. The only alternative was…

I still need to do more research, but it seems that my departure from a straight up belief in original sin/total depravity puts me at odds with my own theological tradition, Methodism. As much as John Wesley disliked Calvinism, his unquestioning acceptance of total depravity meant that he would in essence always be one-fifth Calvinist. As far as I can tell, the only thing keeping Wesley out of the quicksand of the other four points of Calvinism was the invention of “prevenient grace”.  Taking the place of Calvinism’s “irresistible grace”, prevenient grace is the Methodist term for God’s way of…

For most of my life the American stereotype overseas seemed to be “the obnoxious American” – the loudmouth foreigner who thought the whole world revolved around him and his needs.  I wonder what the world currently thinks of when they imagine a typical American? Last week I had a short conversation with a woman from another country. She’s been living and working in Columbus for two years.  She described life in her home culture as being hard and dangerous. She sometimes feared for her children’s lives. She said in Indiana she didn’t have to worry over her children and for…