We’re Singing This at our Good Friday Service – “There Is A Fountain Filled with Blood,” sung by Red Mountain Church

Massachusetts has nothing better to do – Groups Spar Over Massachusetts Transgender ‘Bathroom Bill’

With all that is going on in our culture and economy, MA legislators must not have a lot to do. Apparently spending time on who gets to go to what bathroom is high on the “need to do” list. Crazy. Just really crazy. Click here.

What does Roman Catholic Evangelism look like?

From an early age standing on street corners as a ten-year-old in Norfolk, VA, handing out Bible tracts to sailors, to adulthood and Evangelism Explosion, I have offered to others a direct Gospel message – proclamation of forgiveness of sin through the substitutionary death of Jesus and the call to repent and believe in Him. I understand that for many evangelicals of the emergent variety, this is a reductionist version of the gospel and too privatized and individualistic. Teaching people how to go to heaven when they die is so neanderthal and unsophisticated!!! But that is another discussion. My main point here is to wonder out loud what a Roman Catholic would say in an evangelistic conversation initiated by him with the goal of conversion on the part of the listener.

I have had evangelical Protestants witness to me, not knowing that I was a Christian. I have never had a Roman Catholic witness to me, so I have no direct experience of what that conversation would look like. I have shared my faith with many Roman Catholics, so I am aware of some basic responses and beliefs. But if you put Roman Catholicism in an Evangelism Explosion type format, what is it that RCs would be taught to say.

How do RCs witness? I’m just wondering. I have some idea of what they would say to an evangelical Protestant who needs to come home to the true church, but in the case I am imagining here, what would be their line of thought if the person to whom they were witnessing was an outright pagan?

Deconstructing Bart D. Ehrman

Ehrman is a professor of religion at UNC-Chapel Hill. A popular lecturer he is regularly featured by the Teaching Company, which records courses of many of the great teachers on university campuses (a series I regularly listen to or watch via the public library). He is also a good read, publishing books on early Christianity and the early New Testament documents. To quote Ben Witherington, in age disposed to ‘dis’ the Bible anyway, which is to say, in a generally Biblically illiterate age, Bart’s work has been seen as confirming suspicions already long held by the skeptical or those prone to be skeptical about the Bible and Christianity. Since Bart is a Wheaton College graduate, former evangelical and now atheist, he knows how to land the blows he wants to strike against orthodox Christianity and what he considers unwarranted confidence in the Bible. His most popular book as of late seems to be Misquoting Jesus, and now he is out with a new work, Jesus Interrupted. (A great title, by the way, if you are writing for the audience Bart writes for. This is a take off on the book Girl Interrupted which was also made into a film and a popular work among the young).

Ben Witherington takes on Ehrman’s skepticism and his scholarship. Ben’s writings are sane, balanced, broad in scope and charitable without gullibility. I recommend him on all things scholarly when it comes to New Testament studies. I always check in on his blog. He does not skimp on analysis. Get ready to do some reading. But he is worth the read and builds confidence in the Bible student that when she reads the New Testament, it is virtually the very writings of the original authors that are being read and that authentic Christianity is the product of the New Testament documents and not the product of later conspiracies by the church to turn Jesus of Nazareth into something he actually was not, a view popularized by such works as the Divinci Code.

I just wish that Ben was not a Methodist and Arminian. Often his commitment to Arminianism becomes the linchpin of some of his arguments, and when it does, then Armininianism itself becomes the issue. And when that becomes the center out of which a response is formed, then I become uneasy. For instance, Ben dismisses part of Ehrman’s thought because Ehrman in Ben’s view is arguing a position that is actually a rejection of the God of Calvinism. Ben’s God is not that God; therefore, Ehrman is arguing against something which does not exist. Well, okay, but then Ben must go on to demonstrate that his version of God is superior to Calvin’s. And in my view Arminianism can’t yield a superior God. It comes as no surprise that Ben is not a fan of John Piper

Still, I think for scholarship itself and as a compendium for the latest in biblical studies, Ben is a rich resource and a friend to orthodoxy and evangelicalism in particular.