Toward a Clearer Understanding of Biblical Inerrancy
Does the fact that textual variations exist in our biblical manuscripts make you uncomfortable? It certainly made me uncomfortable in a Greek course during my junior year of college when we came across some variant readings in a New Testament passage we were studying. I must have assumed that the manuscripts available to us today were without error and contained no variation. It made me think about how these variations affect the...
Diagnosing Our Individualism(s)
Individualism is not a problem contained to our time. No matter how much we might argue about the “good ol’ days,” the over-emphasis on one’s self is a perennial problem, or even the first problem. In the Garden Adam and Eve decided to place their own individual desires above the commands of One who was external from them, even though that One was their own Creator. In doing so, they reaped the consequences. As a result, we shouldn’t...
2018 Theological Symposium in Review
On October 22-23, the Commission for Theological Integrity held its annual Theological Symposium on the campus of Randall University in Moore, Oklahoma. Over the course of nine presentations, approximately 350 students, pastors, professors, layman, and others reflected on subjects as diverse as the Great Commission, marriage, Christian hymnody, the wisdom literature, the Lord’s Supper, and more. Four Forum members attended, and three...
The Kosmos and the Logos
Christians hold to a persuasive argument for what living the good life means. We believe that God has created all things through His ordered thought, the Logos (Jn. 1:1-3; Col. 1:16). When we conform ourselves to the image of the Logos, we are most fully alive. The ancient Greeks also held a belief in a transcendent order embedded in the universe. In an earlier essay, I explained that the early church recognized the truth of this...
A View from Nowhere: The Overlooked Problem of Entertainment Culture
by Frank and Christa Thornsbury All culture everywhere expresses thought; that is, all culture everywhere expresses a vision of what makes life worth living. Culture is always an attempt at making collective aesthetic and moral judgments. For instance, Homer’s Iliad expresses the ancient Greek sense of the good life by illustrating the virtues of courage and of the love of family and country. Shakespeare’s histories provide dramatic...
“A Critical Place”: Hannah Dow and the Memoirs of Nineteenth-century Women Missionaries
The first entry in Hannah Gould Dow’s journal records her decision to enter the mission field. On June 17, 1843, having found out that her fiancé J. C. Dow had been approved by the Freewill Baptist Board of Foreign Missions (Randall Movement) to serve as a missionary in India, she wrote, “I am now placed in a critical place. The question is, ‘Shall I go or not?’”[1] Like a growing number of young New England women, she answered in the...
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