Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Without thinking Angels (or even Abraham or Isaac) are or were real, and without feeling it is strictly necessary to go find a positive message where nothing truly positive was originally intended in passages from the Jewish and Christian scriptures, I’m nonetheless moved by this (reformed) Rabbinic take on the Abraham / Isaac story, left [...]

Subscribing to a number of bloggers who belong to Biblioblogs keeps me busy realizing how much I don’t know. I say this by way of making clear that this is a “thinking out loud post” – not a “here’s how it is” post, and also to give me an opportunity to say how grateful I [...]

Buzz Thomas visited Chattanooga a year or two back & a dear friend* invited me to accompany him and his wife to a book signing event. I picked up a copy… breezed through it, then set it aside. I found it pretty weak tea, with a propensity to overstate some issues, understate others, and [...]

A friend from church lent me his copy of James the Brother of Jesus. Rather than review it properly, I’ll just list what the author tries to achieve in terms of my response to it.
Heading 1: Those items I felt the author achieved convincingly.
These are items which the author convinced me of or that [...]

Ok, picking up where we left off last week discussing belief, specifically on the Biblical angle, I’d like to add in just a note about a theory of salvation that there wasn’t room to discuss in the previous post. This is the theory that Matthew and James could support salvation by faith plus “works”.
Rabbit trail [...]

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
If we are playing 7 degrees [...]

I left something out yesterday in the discussion of Universalism. When I said this, ‘It is not because, as Albert Mohler suggests, of “superficial preaching in church pulpits” that most American Christians believe that Christianity isn’t the only way to heaven – it is because their belief in the goodness of God is more real [...]

I find the sentiments Mike Whitenton expresses here quite laudable, and unfortunately, unusual. And, I would carry them further.
That’s not specifically about the relevance of Second Temple Messianism to the 21st Century Church – but more generally, this:
…but sometimes questions like his are posited because of an underlying belief that the academy drains the [...]