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A Layman's Historical Guide to the Inerrancy Debate

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Tuesday, 16 March 2010 12:23

Here is an great article detaining the Inerrancy Debate that took place over the last half of the 20th Century:

A Layman's Historical Guide to the Inerrancy Debate

Article by William B. Evans February 2010

 

Means of our Christian Growth

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Monday, 15 March 2010 08:59

I believe that with every pastor there is a desire to know Christ and to make Christ known to all.  The greatest struggle is success demands that our society make on us.  What is the balance of contextualization vs. conceptualization?  In the last year I have struggled with what John Piper advocates concept-creation as the balance to over-contextualization that is seen in many ministries of our day. He states:
...we must also labor to bring about, in the minds of our listeners, conceptual categories that may be missing from their mental framework. If we only use the thought structures they already have, some crucial biblical truths will remain unintelligible, no matter how much contextualizing we do. This work of concept creation is harder than contextualization, but just as important. (http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TasteAndSee/ByDate/2008/2717_Preaching_As_Concept_Creation_Not_Just_Contextualization/)
I read today and article by Ligon Duncan on "The Ordinary Means of Growth." I appreciated his exhortation about the importance of ordinary means of Christian growth.  He compares this Biblical paradigm with others in stating:
In sum, there are basically three views of Gospel ministry. There are those who think that effective cultural engagement requires an updating of the message. There are those who think that effective ministry requires an updating of our methods. And there are those who think that effective ministry begins with a pre-commitment to God’s message and methods, set forth in His Word.... Ordinary means of grace-based ministry is ministry that focuses on doing the things God, in the Bible, says are central to the spiritual health and growth of His people, and which aims to see the qualities and priorities of the church reflect biblical norms. Ordinary means ministry is thus radically committed to biblical direction of the priorities of ministry.
The fundamental assumption underlying these new approaches is that “everything has changed,” and so our methods must change. I would want to dispute both parts of that equation. Whatever the entailments of our present cultural moment, constituent human nature has not changed...
While I certainly believe that contextualization is valid, much of what goes on a contextualization is over-contextualization in my opinion.  This article is an excellent explanation and encouragement to pastors who want to keep from getting caught up in Christian ministry fads and pursue God's plan of building his kingdom.

   

The Gospel of Jesus Christ

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Thursday, 04 March 2010 12:25

The Gospel Of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:1 – 19)

By D. A. Carson

The Spurgeon Fellowship Journal - Spring 2008

Many have commented on the fact that the church in the western world is going through a time of remarkable fragmentation. This fragmentation extends to our understanding of the gospel. For some Christians, "the gospel" is a narrow set of teachings about Jesus and his death and resurrection which, rightly believed, tip people into the kingdom. After that, real discipleship and personal transformation begin, but none of that is integrally related to “the gospel.” This is a far cry from the dominant New Testament emphasis that understands “the gospel” to be the embracing category that holds much of the Bible together, and takes Christians from lostness and alienation from God all the way through conversion and discipleship to the consummation, to resurrection bodies, and to the new heaven and the new earth.

Other voices identify the gospel with the first and second commandments—the commandments to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves. These commandments are so central that Jesus himself insists that all the prophets and the law hang on them (Matthew 22:34- 40)—but most emphatically they are not the gospel.

A third option today is to treat the ethical teaching of Jesus found in the Gospels as the gospel—yet it is the ethical teaching of Jesus abstracted from the passion and resurrection narrative found in each Gospel. This approach depends on two disastrous mistakes. First, it overlooks the fact that in the first century, there was no “Gospel of Matthew,” “Gospel of Mark,” and so forth. Our four Gospels were called, respectively, “The Gospel According to Matthew,” “The Gospel According to Mark,” and so forth. In other words, there was only one gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This one gospel, this message of news that was simultaneously threatening and promising, concerned the coming of Jesus the Messiah, the long-awaited King, and included something about his origins, the ministry of his forerunner, his brief ministry of teaching and miraculous transformation, climaxing in his death and resurrection. These elements are not independent pearls on a string that constitutes the life and times of Jesus the Messiah. Rather, they are elements tightly tied together. Accounts of Jesus’ teaching cannot be rightly understood unless we discern how they flow toward and point toward Jesus’ death and resurrection. All of this together is the one gospel of Jesus Christ, to which the canonical Gospels bear witness. To study the teaching of Jesus without simultaneously reflecting on his passion and resurrection is far worse than assessing the life and times of George Washington without reflecting on the American Revolution, or than evaluating Hitler’s Mein Kampf without thinking about what he did and how he died. Second, we shall soon see that to focus on Jesus’ teaching while making the cross peripheral reduces the glorious good news to mere religion, the joy of forgiveness to mere ethical conformity, the highest motives for obedience to mere duty. The price is catastrophic.

Read more: The Gospel of Jesus Christ

   

The Steps of Integrative Theology's Method

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Friday, 22 January 2010 17:49

I am facinated how the method one uses for developing their theology controls much of the genuiness of the belief system that results from it.  So many Christians react to theologies that they don't know about or and emotionally dislike without any Biblical basis.  Integrative theology is a great attempt to develop a theologiacal method that is not entirely deductive or Inductive.  It places itself as abductive since is a

verificational method of researching one basic issue, which doesn't begin with an allegedly  blank mind (as inductive methods do), or with a confessional statement presupposed to be true (as in deductive methods), but with several historical and contemporary answers as hyupothesis to be tested (Inductive Theology, Gordon R. Lewish & Bruce A Demarest, p11).

  The steps according the Lewis and Demarest are are Summarized by 6 key phrases:

  1. The Problem
  2. Histoical Hypotheses
  3. Biblical Teaching
  4. Systematic formulation
  5. Apologetic Interaction
  6. Relevance for life and Ministry.

I intend to explore this method of doing thelogy myself and in teaching in the church.  My desire is the it would produce great light with out the heat that can occur when people react to biblical teaching with doing any verification of their own theological presuppositions themselves. 

   

Thick Gospel vs. Thin Gospel

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Friday, 08 June 2007 04:52

Thick Gospel Vs. Thin Gospel
Growing A God-Centered Evangelism

When one things about evangelism and reaching people with the Gospel one must look to the Centrality of sovereign, saving grace because the quickening grace of God in salvation completely exalts God.  Grace is God-honoring and humanity-humbling.   We must see the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a "Thick Gospel" and not a "Thin Gospel" 

 You may be asking, What in the world is a "Thick Gospel"?   We all know that God initiates grace and that this grace frees us from the rejection of others in Evangelism.   We know that evangelism is impossible without grace, for grace is what frees nonbelievers from their enslavement to sin.  The problem with our understanding of the Gospel is that we stop our understanding of its relevance at the point a person profession Christ.  For many Christians the Gospel is only for unbelievers because believers need to go beyond the Gospel in the the deeper-life

Nothing could be further from the truth.  The source of all grace is the Cross of our Savior Jesus Christ.   The fact that "grace" continues its effect beyond our initial liberation from unbelief and continues to energize Christians should show that the Gospel of the Cross needs to be preached to Christian and non-Christian alike.   What Christians need to understand is that after their salvation, the gracious power of the Holy Spirit upholds them through their Christian Journey.   Saved under God-Centered and grace oriented evangelism, they have a wonderful framework for a Christian life of God-centered, grace oriented sanctification.   And the basis for this grace in the Gospel of  Jesus Christ.  All grace was purchased for us at the Cross and that is why the Cross is the center of preaching is the early church and should be the basis of every Sermon we preach to people today.

   

Features This Week

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Friday, 08 June 2007 04:18

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