In 1961, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood. They intended the work to be a response to Bernard Ramm, who in 1954 had published a work arguing that Noah’s Deluge was a local catastrophe. Borrowing heavily from George McCready Price (1870-1963), a Seventh-Day Adventist author, Whitcomb and Morris contended that the flood of Noah’s day accounts for…
These past weeks have been some of the hardest in my 40+ years in ministry. There has been a near daily “punch to the gut” as we’ve processed devastating news about peers and mentors with whom we have served. As Penny and I head to the convention in a little over a week, it will be with heavy yet hopeful…
Last week I gave the faculty lecture at Southeastern. I talked about the 6th century debate between John Philoponus and Cosmas Indicopleustes about the shape of the earth. In the days of the early church, the apologetic debate was not between creation and evolution, but creation and eternalism. The pagan philosophers argued ex nihilo nihil fit (“Out of nothing comes nothing”)….
In this brief clip Jeff Zweerink, Fuz Rana, and I discuss the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture. A good working idea of what these terms mean is important when relating the claims of science to the teachings of Scripture.
Liberals too often see everything as third order issues while Fundamentalists tend to all matters as first order issues. Evangelicals commit themselves to the difficult task of doing theological triage–sorting out the hierarchy of doctrinal matters.
In this brief video I ask the question, “What was Moses doing when he penned the creation account in Genesis 1-2?” In day-to-day communications we typically recognize the difference between what a person says and what they mean, and intuitively interpret them accordingly. However, we often don’t notice a third component: what a person is doing with his or her words. Using…
Recently I was on Reason to Believe’s program, “28:19.” Krista Bontrager, the show’s cohost, asked about the best way to bring up old-earth interpretations to a young-earth church staff. When it comes to bringing up controversial issues to one’s pastor or youth pastor, how one approaches the subject is just as important as what one has to say. My advice:…
Ever heard of the Warfare Metaphor? It’s the claim that Christianity and science have been and always will be in a state of inevitable and irreconcilable conflict. History tells a different story. Here’s a clip of a conversation in 2015 that Jamie Dew and I had on the subject.
Here’s a third clip from the interviews I gave last summer in Turkey. I was asked about Old-earth creationism’s understanding of divine action in nature. By and large, Old-earth creationism accepts the consensus findings of the scientific community concerning the age of the universe (about 13.8 billion years old), the age of the earth (about 4.6 billions years old), and…
Imagine that you were called to minister to Nazi war criminals. That’s exactly what happened to Henry Gerecke, a Lutheran minister enlisted (at the age of fifty!) as an Army chaplain during World War II. At the war’s end, when other soldiers were coming home, Gerecke was called to the most difficult ministry assignment imaginable: to serve as chaplain to…