If Jesus Gives Eternal Life But You Refuse to Live It, Have You Really Received It?

What do you mean when you say you are a Christian? In a Christian-majority country like ours, people mean different things when they claim the Christian label. At the lowest, most basic level, you claim being a Christian because you aren’t Muslim, Jewish or Hindu. But it also means that you aren’t an...

Why “Christianity,” “Judaism,” and “Islam” are Misnomers

I was sitting in my office the other day gazing rather absent-mindedly at my library when my eye caught a book I hadn’t looked at in a while: Handbook of Denominations in the United States. I had to get this book in seminary for a church history class. Back then it was 320 pages long and described 225...

Safe and Sound

“Safe and sound.” We use the phrase often enough that it’s easy to think that the two words are almost synonymous and that the distinction is a matter of nuance. But it’s not. Someone once illustrated the difference: “The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the...

Creation Care: A Biblical Mandate

At each stage of creation in Genesis 1, God likes what he has created. He declares that the world is good. When it’s all done, he declares that the creation is very good. And then something goes very wrong. First the humans decide that they don’t want to be what God created them to be—humans. They want to...

Is the New Testament Anti-Semitic?

One of the things that I have heard recently is that the New Testament is anti-Semitic. Certain New Testament passages, particularly in John and in Acts, are cited to justify the claim, and at first glance the verses do seem to support the accusation, citing that Jesus’ main opponents are the Jews, and they...

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