“Why didn’t the Christian God ever explicitly and clearly condemn slavery?” This was John Loftus’ question in his book, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity. He posed it after sharing the following chilling account of slavery as practiced in the antebellum American south, He took her into the kitchen, and stripped […]
Entries Tagged as 'Hermeneutics'
Contra Mundum: Slavery and the Old Testament
April 3rd, 2010 33 Comments
Tags: Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · John Loftus · Old Testament Ethics · Slavery · Theology
Sunday Study: Two Forms of Inerrancy
February 8th, 2010 6 Comments
The discussion arising in response to my recent post Inerrancy and Biblical Authority, both on this blog and on some of the blogs that linked to it, got me thinking a bit more about this topic. I was reminded of an interesting comment made by Alan Rhoda regarding the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Philosophical […]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Inerrancy · Michael Tooley · William Lane Craig
Contra Mundum: The Judgmental Jesus
January 29th, 2010 22 Comments
Few things are thought to be more morally pernicious than the practice of judging others. Sometimes this is given a theological spin with people citing the Sermon on the Mount “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure […]
Tags: Contra Mundum · Ethics · Hermeneutics · Investigate Magazine · Judging
Sunday Study: Inerrancy and Biblical Authority
January 18th, 2010 46 Comments
Recently Glenn Peoples and Dominic Bnonn Tennant had an interesting exchange over the issue of biblical inerrancy, the doctrine, that the bible contains no errors. In his post, Errantly Assuming Inerrancy in History, Peoples makes this interesting comment, While there has always been a clear expression of the view that what Scripture teaches is correct, […]
Tags: David Brink · Dominic Bnonn Tennant · Glenn Peoples · Inerrancy · Michael Tooley · Sunday Study
John Loftus on Calvin, Matthew Flannagan and Psalm 14
January 11th, 2010 17 Comments
John Loftus from Debunking Christianity is at it again. In his recent post, When Psalm 14:1 Says Atheists Are “Fools” This Can Be Easily Refuted, he suggests he can easily refute the idea of biblical inerrancy and cites me to assist him in doing so! Unfortunately he makes several straight-forward mistakes. Given that he has […]
Tags: John Calvin · John Loftus · Psalm 14
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part II
January 10th, 2010 45 Comments
In my previous post, Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I, I mentioned the position suggested by Alvin Plantinga and endorsed by Nicholas Wolterstorff that the passages in Joshua that appear to record the carrying out of genocide at God’s command, such as, “putting all the people to the sword”, “leaving no survivors”, […]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Canaanites · Genocide · K Lawson Younger · Kenneth Kitchen · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Old Testament Ethics · Sunday Study
Sunday Study: Joshua and the Genocide of the Canaanites Part I
January 3rd, 2010 52 Comments
Critics of Christianity often claim that the book of Joshua teaches that God commanded genocide. Raymond Bradley for example states, In chapters 7 through 12, [the book of Joshua] treats us to a chilling chronicle of the 31 kingdoms, and all the cities therein, that fell victim to Joshua’s, and God’s, genocidal policies. Time and […]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Brevard Childs · Canaanites · Genocide · Hermeneutics · Joshua · Kenneth Kitchen · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Old Testament Ethics · Raymond Bradley · Sunday Study · Theology · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
