The Bible says that we must believe in Jesus alone—not self—for eternal life. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and others say that we must contribute our works—not believe in Christ alone—for eternal life. There are stories about Catholic and Orthodox saints performing miracles, so does that mean that they were saved? The short answer is “no.”[Read More]
hermeneutics
Retranslating James 2:14–26
People make James 2:14–26 harder than it should be. I think that the main problem is that man naturally wants to earn his own righteousness, so there is a tendency for men to misread biblical texts to make their salvation dependent on themselves.
There are some particularities to the English language that have become difficult in James, so I am offering a retranslation with a few oddities that I think are justified. This translation is part of a soteriology class that I am taking and I will include a commentary in a paper for that class (in other words, I want my professor to poke holes in the commentary it before I share it publicly).[Read More]
What is the Kingdom compared to in the parable of the leaven?
The following is an excerpt from a paper for an upcoming volume on Bible difficulties related to eschatology. This particular paper deals with the parables of the mustard seed and leaven. I take the view that these two parables depict the current evil age rather than the future Messianic kingdom. Part of this reasoning is that leaven typically represents corruption in the Bible. The most common response that I’m hearing is “But the Bible says that the kingdom is like leaven, so leaven must be the good kingdom here.” Here’s my response to that:
The False Gospel of Woke Evangelicalism
If you are a Christian, then you are almost certainly concerned about the underprivileged. Nobody wants any minority group to suffer, but Christians want much more for minorities than the secular world could possibly hope for. Since everyone is born spiritually dead and on a path to hell, Christians want people to receive eternal life. Unfortunately, the world has an ideology of wokism that is in conflict with the Gospel. What is worse, some evangelicals have fallen for wokism. Woke evangelicals keep people on the path to hell in two ways: first by distracting the church from evangelism thereby preventing the unbeliever from hearing, understanding, and believing the Gospel and second by distorting the gospel itself. This second problem, the woke perversion of the Gospel, is the topic of this post.[Read More]
Four Objects Related to the 70-Year Chronology
Lately, I have been doing some work with the Book of Ezra, which begins with Cyrus’ decree that was issued, “that the word of Jehovah by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished” (Ezra 1:1). Ezra does not actually quote Jeremiah, but assumes that the reader is biblically literate. The work that I am doing will explore the biblical issues further, but as I studied for that project, I came across some archaeological items that are worth discussing here.[Read More]
Works-Universalism: Contradiction or Middle Ground?
We have developed a quadrant model for describing soteriological compromises. The biblical message of salvation is summarized as Faith Alone in Christ Alone (FACA). Two ways to reject this are by rejecting the sufficiency of FACA or the necessity of FACA. Each of these two sides has differing extremes: On the side that rejects sufficiency, a near alternative is Works-Assisted Condition while a distant alternative is Works-Assisted Merit; on the side that rejects necessity, a near alternative is Christian Pluralism while a distant alternative is Christian Universalism.[Read More]