The Patterns of Evidence documentary series has become popular with evangelicals in recent years. It proposes a revised chronology based on David Rohl’s work that shortens the Egyptian timeline such that the Exodus weakened Egypt’s army, making them vulnerable for an invasion and occupation that’s known as the Hyksos Period (aka the Second Intermediate Period). Others who accept the historicity of the Exodus will typically say that Israel was enslaved during the Hyksos Period and left sometime afterwards during the Eighteenth Dynasty.
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apologetics
Book Review: Zane Hodges Did Not Change His View on the Gospel
Kenneth Wilson has written a book entitled Heresy of the Grace Evangelical Society: Become a Christian Without Faith in Jesus as God and Savior. There are legitimate criticisms to be made of GES, but you will not find many of them in Wilson’s book. Indeed, he actually had the opposite effect from what Wilson wanted. The day it was released, Grant Hawley of Free Grace Alliance disavowed Wilson’s work, which is no surprise since Wilson called Hawley’s views heretical. Several of Wilson’s fans have come out to say that this book caused them to question his other works, which is quite reasonable. Kenneth Wilson is most well known for his studies on church history. I appreciated an article that he wrote last year for SBL and even quoted it positively in our recent volume on current issues in soteriology,1 but having seen how poorly he represents his contemporaries, we are left wondering how well he deals with theologians of old. In the same volume, I criticized Christian Pluralism, which is the position that Wilson takes, so in retrospect, I would have loved to interacted with his book there, but perhaps that is a discussion for another day.[Read More]
We are spiritually dead before we sin.
There is room within orthodoxy Christianity to disagree over points in hamartiology, but an orthodox Christian should recognize immediately the false view that we spiritually earn a death sentence when we first sin. The biblical doctrine of spiritual death will be considered here from two angles: first the Godward side and then the manward side.
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Four Examples of Colossians 4:2–6
It is unlikely that you will argue over apologetics with an atheist until he becomes a believer. There are many benefits to apologetics in evangelism, but in the end, an unbeliever needs to accept what is written in the Bible. Namely, he needs to believe in Christ for eternal life. If he does not believe that God exists or that Christ is risen, etc., then he will not accept Christ’s offer of salvation. Even if he does believe in fundamental apologetic truths, he can still reject the Gospel and instead rely on his works for eternal life. We must use the Bible in evangelism.[Read More]
Trends in Ecotheology (Excerpt)
The following is an excerpt from a paper entitled, “Kingdom Postponement: A Watershed Doctrine for the Dispensational Worldview,” presented at the 2021 Council on Dispensational Hermeneutics.[Read More]
Can you tell the difference between an atheist, a liberal, and an evangelical?
Can you tell the difference between an atheist, a liberal, and an evangelical?
Seems like it should be easy enough, right? Well, not exactly…
I have been teaching on apologetics in church lately. A few weeks ago, I did a presentation on bible manuscripts (available here, but only in Russian), and last Sunday, I spoke on the reliability of the biblical autographs (see the whole thing here).
As an introduction to this Sunday’s talk, we played a game. I took quotes from different sources and had our congregation guess if the quote came from an atheist, a liberal, or an evangelical.