Does the Trinity Prove Anything about Gender? Not Much
April 19, 2008
Amid all the arguments among Christians regarding the roles of men and women in home, church, and society, one of the most prominent nowadays is the argument from the Trinity, namely, that the way the persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) relate and are related to each other tells us something important about how men and women are related and ought to relate to each other.
And no wonder some argue this way. What a trump card! “Our view of gender is rooted in the very nature of God!”
The first troubling thing to notice here, however, is that this argument is deployed by both complementarians/patriarchalists and egalitarians/feminists.
“Creation vs. Evolution”: Is This a Sensible Question?
June 22, 2007
School boards in an uproar. Parents protective of their children. Teachers defensive. Students confused. And American presidential candidates feeling compelled to declare their views. The furore over creation versus evolution has been going on for almost a century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859).
The sad thing is that so much energy is wasted on what is, mostly, a non-issue: “creation versus evolution” is, in most respects, nonsense.
There’s No Such Thing as a Catholic Evangelical
May 9, 2007
Recently, Francis Beckwith, a respected philospher at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, announced his return to the Roman Catholic Church. That is interesting enough, given that Baylor is the flagship school of Texas Baptists. But Beckwith simultaneously resigned from the presidency of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), and later resigned from the organization entirely.
His reported reason for the latter move was apprehension about the contentious nature of the ETS, which has been roiled by sometimes-vituperative controversies–most recently over so-called open theism (a new form of evangelical theology, promulgated by Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, Greg Boyd, and others, that suggests that the future is “open” because even God does not know it for certain).
According, however, to the acting president of the ETS, Hassell Bullock of Wheaton College, Illinois, the main issue was simply that Beckwith, as a Roman Catholic, could no longer subscribe to the ETS’s statement of faith, which includes the following clause: “the Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”
Is the New Testament Reliable?
January 18, 2007
During my recent talk at the University of British Columbia on “Who Is Jesus?” I promised a short bibliography for those interested in questions raised about the reliability of the New Testament by the “Jesus Seminar,” The Da Vinci Code, Prof. Elaine Pagels, and others on the popular religious landscape. There is much confusion among even educated people today–sometimes especially among educated people today–about whether the New Testament, and the gospels in particular, render a trustworthy historical portrait of Jesus (quite apart from the question of whether or not we should regard the Bible as Holy Scripture, of course).
As a professional historian myself, who has studied not only the Bible but also the history of Biblical studies, I understand why people hold various views on these matters. Historical argument is never an open-and-shut case, but is always a matter of weighing evidence and argument for the most likely explanation. But after thirty years of academic historical study, I have come to this simple conclusion: There sure are a lot of good reasons to trust Matthew, Mark, Luke and John–and Paul–when they say that Jesus said this or did that. So I do.
