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To Trust in Man or the Lord, that is the Question
As a young pup Christian in college in the Jesus Revolution days, I was born-again into a Scripture memory focused campus Christian organization. I memorized a very lot of verses, chapters of epistles and even entire letters, like Philippians, and chunks of other...
Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity
In a couple previous posts I wrote about what it means that the Christian’s citizenship in is heaven, and what it does not mean, and how the understanding of our spiritual home developed in the history of Pietism. This happened, along with the predictable consequences...
The History of Pietism and Christian Cultural Irrelevance
Pietism is the most important development in the history of Christianity most Christians have never heard of. It wasn’t high on my radar either until a few years back when I began to learn about its contribution to the rise of secularism in Western culture. Because of...
Articles on Theology
When All Doesn’t Mean All: Calvinism Gets it Right
I recently wrote a post on I Timothy 2, where Paul says something that is a favorite proof text for Arminians, but they ignore the difficulty the text presents for their position. Reformed theology has been a critical part of attempting to build an enduring faith in...
In Case You Hadn’t Noticed: We Live in a Fallen World
I write this, and my title, while we as a nation are in the middle of a bitterly contested election. It seems to many of us that a whole lot of chicanery is going on, or more accurately fraud and outright theft of a presidential election. We have lived through four...
Christianity Is a Religion of Knowledge: Seek It!
As I've been writing my way through the Bible, I've recently been engaging with Paul's letters, and his focus on knowledge in the life of the Christian has stood out to me. Since the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, for much of Christianity knowledge has...
Articles on Explanatory Power
When In Doubt, Open Your Eyes
If you're like every human being on the face of the earth, you sometimes doubt what you think you know. It's part of what's known as the human condition, and being finite. We can only know so much. There is in fact much more that we don't know, way much more, than we...
When In Doubt: Is This All Really A Grand Cosmic Coincidence?
In my previous post I argued that secular Western culture often makes belief in God problematic. For those who go with the secular cultural flow, instead of continually challenging and fighting it, God can seem less than real, less plausible. This has nothing to do...
Nabeel Qureshi, RIP
Death is ugly. Jesus himself agreed, as we can surmise from his response to the death of his friend Lazarus. Standing before the tomb where his dead friend had been buried four days Scripture says, "Jesus wept." Why in the world would Jesus cry when in moments he was...
Articles on Culture
Classical Education: Opportunity to Challenge The Religion of Secularism
We were all taught growing up that there is this thing called the separation of church and state. The phrase goes back to a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists (CT) in 1802 where he mentions a wall between the two. This metaphor of Jefferson was...
What Parents and their Children Can Learn from the Train Wreck of Amy Winehouse’s Life
If you're at all familiar with popular music in the last decade or two you surely know of Amy Winehouse. This young talent died of alcohol poisoning in July of 2011 at the ripe old age of 27, joining the pantheon of young musicians who've died before they got old. My...
Another Mass Shooting: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”
My first response to hearing of the horrific shooting in El Paso was, where was the good guy with the gun who could have stopped this? This is the world bequeathed to us by a secular culture that has rejected God, that you can't go shopping on a Saturday morning in...
Articles on Apologetics
Telos: The Secularists’ Worst Nightmare
Back in 1968 as the sexual revolution was raging, Pope Paul VI wrote a profoundly counter-cultural encyclical called Humanae Vitae. One of the things that made it so profound (and something completely missed by the Evangelical leaders of the day) was its appeal to...
Not Made Up Stories: That we may know the certainty of the things we have been taught
In addition to writing here at The Persuasive Christian Parent, several years ago I started writing my way through the Bible. I gave that blog the uninspiring title of, My Walk Through the Bible. Recently I finished the gospel of Mark and moved on to Luke. As I was...
Do Your Children a Favor: Watch “Brad’s Status” with Them
I'd never heard of this movie with Ben Stiller until a few days ago, and when I read the premise and learned it was on Amazon Prime I figured we'd give it a go. Brad's Status is about a 50-something middle class man watching his only son explore college, Harvard no...
Articles on Parenting and Family
Polyamory for All!
The gay "marriage" ruling, the gift that keeps on giving. As one headline read: "‘Sister Wives’ family points to same-sex marriage cases in arguing against Utah polygamy ban." Of course they would, and they would be perfectly logical to do so. In fact, the Obergefell...
Notable Quotation
We are relearning that marriage is not optional. The evidence started piling up in 1965 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the breakdown of the African-American family. In 2012, Charles Murray took us on a walk through Fishtown where we met a white (often...