I'm trying to decide the best way to frame the next in the Prophecy in the NT series, and while pondering that came across something that looked like fun to tackle. I recently discovered Dominic Bnonn Tennant's blog via a post to one of my Facebook Groups--specifically, his post, "Presupposing freewill theism is the opposite …
Prophecy in the NT: John and Elijah
We've been carefully building our understanding of how the New Testament uses the prophecies of the Tanakh by going through Matthew's citations in order to establish principles of interpretation. Today, we're going to go a little sideways, both reinforcing previous principles (as we've done before) and jumping ahead to the first citation in the book …
Prophecy in the NT, 5th Principle: A Voice in the Wilderness
A prophecy may use physical descriptions to describe spiritual realities. Poor John the Baptist. Not only did he lose his head, but he was completely overshadowed by his younger cousin in history. Not that John minds: "I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, …
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Creation: The Scientific Method is Biblical
Let's talk science! In my previous posts, I've presented some musings on the Bible's creation narrative and our current scientific understanding of the record of nature. The response to this is to argue that these posts presuppose "uniformism," the idea that the natural laws and processes that we see today have always been the same, and "naturalism" …
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Creation: Why Did God Need To Make It So Old?
"Why does God need fourteen billion years to make the universe? Why couldn't he have just done it in six days like he said he did?" the young-earth creationist asks. I can think of at least three reasons. God Is Not Bored By the Passage of Time There's an old, probably apocryphal story about a …
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Creation: Why the Earth Isn’t Young
In my previous posts, I've demonstrated that the original Hebrew of Genesis by no means confines us to a young-earth paradigm and that either the universe at large is very old, or else God has deliberately engineered it to lie to us. But what about the earth itself? Maybe "the heavens and the earth" are …
Iron Show: Discussing Preterism with Brian Godawa
A couple of weeks ago, Johnny and I interviewed Brian Godawa about his newest novel, Tyrant: Rise of the Beast, and it's non-fictional companion piece, End Times Biblical Prophecy: It's Not What They Told You. Brian takes a preterist stance, meaning that he sees most Biblical prophecy, including the Olivet Discourse, as being fulfilled at or immediately after the …
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Creation: The Speed of Causality
In the comments on one of my previous posts, I've been going back and forth with Vaughn Ohlman, a long-time reader of this blog. We're at a bit of an impasse. He sees my position as giving in to an atheistic assumption of both naturalism (that nature is all there is) and uniformism (that the …
Creation: “Evening” and “Morning”
We've demonstrated that even in the English translation of the Bible, "day" does not necessarily mean 24 hours and can refer to a longer period of time. "But," the young-earth creationist argues, "the Genesis creation account keeps referring to evenings and mornings, so these obviously have to be normal 24 hour days." Well, if …
Happy Passover, 5777!
I didn't get around to writing a new post for Passover this year, so you get . . . archives! Yes, archives. Leaven-free, I promise. First, the links to the old articles: Inspecting the Lamb (the real post) Passover A Bittersweet Beginning Parashah 16: Bo Passover Update And, from a few years ago, I give …