Legality is Not Morality

In my Sunday afternoon group (homegroup) we’ve been going over various Christian ethics questions and trying to discern the Biblical worldview. I noticed a few times through the course of the lessons a dangerous and unquestioned assumption: if it’s legal, it must be good, or at the very least, not bad. For Christians, this is one of the most pernicious and harmful assumptions we can make in our time, so I’d like to flesh out this basic distinction a bit. We’ll start with defining the two terms, legality and morality, and then we’ll compare and contrast them. Finally, we’ll talk … [Read more]

A Dinosaur at Twenty-four

A Class this Summer This summer I took a class at Seminary called “Cultural Dynamics in Ministry.” Essentially, it was a cross-cultural missions class. It was a one-week intensive, which means you go 5 days in a row from 8-5 and do all the lectures for the three-credit-hour course in one week. To top it off, we had a first-time visiting professor from Asbury Seminary. He is a fairly well-known Christian Anthropologist (emphasis on the anthropologist part) who has quite a bit of experience in foreign missions. However, he’s very much NOT a theologian, which created conflict in class. He … [Read more]

Review of Let The Nations Be Glad

The following is a paper I wrote for my World Missions class. The prompt was “Four pages will describe the content of the book, and 4-6 pages will provide an analysis of the book. This analysis should address your opinion of how well the author dealt with the subject. Did he support his points well? What was missing in his arguments? What were the most valuable points in the book?” Please enjoy.  Introduction Let the Nations Be Glad by John Piper is, by any standard, a masterful work. Piper’s handling and inclusion of Biblical text and deep thought is commendable, … [Read more]

Doubting Thomas: Chapter 13

The following is an assignment I had for my ST102 class (Trinitarianism). It is a hypothetical 13th Chapter to the book “Doubting Thomas” by John Cobb. (The book is out of Print, but I have linked a pdf copy of it here.) I highly recommend not wasting your time reading it. It’s what I would classify as trashy liberal theology designed to prey on those who have not studied historic orthodox Christianity. The author specifically excludes the viewpoint of orthodoxy in this adventure of “christology in story form.” The plot line is that Thomas, a young seminarian, runs into a … [Read more]

Feasting or Gluttony: Which are You Doing?

I’m eating barbecue with my friends on Memorial Day. We’ve just floated the Comal River and we are about to blow any kind of diet we had, then a joke gets made about gluttony. Should we be joking about the sin of gluttony? Is it really a laughing matter? Does eating barbecue with your friends on Memorial Day, (way more barbecue than you’d eat on a normal day) even count as gluttony? What is the line between feasting and gluttony? What does the Bible say about feasting? In the bible, feasting is seen primarily in the Old Testament, and the … [Read more]