Paul and Olena Miles with Grace Abroad Ministries
Last month, I posted the text and a translation of James 2:14–26. Since then, I have modified the translation and written some commentary that emphasises the article. You can read it below or download the pdf here:
pmiles James 2 translation and commentary
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]
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]
Our theology develops as we grow in our understanding of Scriptures, so doctrinal shifts are healthy. Perhaps to be more precise, we could say that a lack of doctrinal shift is unhealthy. Every Christian should dedicate his life to the study of Scriptures, so if his theology is not changing, then something is wrong. This is particularly relevant to the clergyman, whether it be a pastor, a missionary, or a volunteer Sunday School teacher.[Read More]
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]
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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