The Mileses

Paul and Olena Miles with Grace Abroad Ministries

justification

Biblical Theology and the Free Grace Crisis

Biblical Theology and Other Theological Methods

Theological methods can be divided into biblical, systematic, historical, and dogmatic theology. As a method, biblical theology studies the Bible as literature, focusing on a particular section of the Bible, whether it be a specific biblical author, period, genre, or such. Systematic theology divides doctrines into categories and considers all that the Bible says about these categories, historical theology studies the development of doctrine through the ages, and dogmatic theology studies schools of thought in theology. The logical procession would begin with biblical theology—the study of the Bible itself—before moving on to systematic and, finally, historical and dogmatic. An error in biblical theology can result in a faulty understanding of the proof texts for systematic theology, which will affect a tradition and is often copied through history.[Read More]

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]

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]

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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