Over the past few years I have witnessed literally hundreds of healings. I contend that healing is just as much a part of the Gospel as forgiveness of sin. In fact, if I thought God was unwilling to heal as he did in times past, I would not preach the Gospel. I do not represent a merely historical religious figure, but a living Christ.

My experience has taught me that those who do not receive healing are generally not convinced that God will heal them. Because they are not fully persuaded of God’s will on the matter, they cannot pray the prayer of faith that is able to heal the sick. They can only pray prayers of doubt and uncertainty, and often die as a result.

Partially in response to the kind of shallow spirituality the past several generations is perceived as producing, partially in disgust to the pragmatic philosophy the underlined the movement, and partially in an attempt to rediscover what it means to be the church, a movement is afoot to undo what the last several generations did by attempting to change church practice so it will more closely resemble older practices in church history.

When I tell people I’m a libertarian, they look at me like I’m crazy. “Isn’t that unchristian?” they ask. “How can you support legalized drugs and gay marriage and immoral stuff? What about morality and God’s law?”

Good question. What about morality? I’m a proponent of biblical morality. It’s God’s law, after all. I believe that mind-altering drugs are bad, that homosexual acts are detestable to God, and that God hates sin. I don’t support sin. I just don’t think the government should get involved in punishing it. Let’s let God sort it out on judgement day. The government doesn’t need to enforce morality.

I would like to do a series on Christian relationships – specifically, the logical, theological and philosophical nuts and bolts of how and why Christians form relationships with God, Christians and non-Christians. As I have been thinking about this topic, the word which often popped into my mind was “contracts” rather than “covenants” or “relationships” but I am going to forego using that word because in modern vernacular “contract” has an economic connotation, and I don’t want to confuse this issue.

Decision Making & the Will of God was written to “help Christians understand what the Bible says about God’s will as it pertains to decision making.” The authors hope that it will give comfort to the group of Christians who believe God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their lives, but for some reason God has not told them what that plan is.

American Christianity is largely backwards in its love of civil religion. I wish to analyse the theological underpinning of this marriage, showing that the marriage of Church and State has developed out of a poor understanding of Christian theology. It is only through a secularised politics that Christian theology will grow.

Several articles and book reviews dealing with the subject of the origin, creation and development of life on this planet.

It seems that the word “faith” is used in many ways today. Some use it to refer to religious tradition in general. Others use it to refer to some kind of mystic spirituality. Neither of those really explain what it is. Kierkegaard thinks of faith as “infinitely and personally and passionately interested on behalf of his own eternal happiness for his relationship to this truth” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 23). For Kierkegaard, it is faith and only faith that allows inspiration to arise. What can we define as this kind of faith? I believe we, like Kierkegaard, can find this answer in the character of Abraham.

Over the past year, especially because of the effect of Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy, many honest questions (and many baseless accusations) have been flying around about libertarianism, foreign policy and Christianity. I wanted to take the time to answer a few of these questions from my own perspective.

The “myths” covered in this 26-part series are beliefs which have become like doctrine in the church, but they would rarely if ever be found in any kind of statement of beliefs. They are elements which are untrue, misleading or questionable which have become part of evangelical Christian culture to varying degrees.

Yet these are things which I also believe are doing varying degrees of damage. At the very least, they distract from the more foundational aspects of God’s church as a fellowship of believers saved by God’s grace in Christ. In some cases, where they are adopted as “essentials,” they are the rocks upon which larger churches, movements and leaders have foundered.

The goal of Zeal for Truth is to find truth. If that were such an easy thing to do, we wouldn’t even need this blog and forum for there would be nothing to discuss, let alone argue or disagree about. The search for philosophical truth, Truth with a capital T, can be a lofty, life-long pursuit for some. Some of us might say even Pilate couldn’t find it when it was staring him in the face.

But my point here is no where near that lofty. I’m just talking about the technicalities of verbally telling the truth (telling the truth while writing is a different can of worms). Spoken communication is so full of potential pitfalls it is a wonder anyone is ever able to get their point across!

Biblical fellowship takes a very explicit and purposeful effort on behalf of all Christians Some churches suffer from theological ignorance – they do their very best to apply fellowship, but, not having a grasp on that thing which they should apply, their application is a crapshoot at best. Or they understand what biblical fellowship is but are either unwilling to apply it or struggle to understand how to do this.

I very much enjoyed reading this book and re-reading it as I wrote this review. I had known of Collins’s work for some years, so it was good to read his autobiographical story. I suppose the big idea that I come away with is that which I wrote about in part 3, my views on the creation of the world. This book has given me cause to think that maybe an interpretation of Genesis 1-2 that is not literal would be possible without doing damage to one’s faith in scripture or the saving work of Christ.

Are sacraments magical? No, they are means that the Holy Spirit use to bring grace to the Church. Do sacraments do away with faith? No, faith is the heartbeat of them. They are nothing without faith on part of the recipient. Is there nothing then to the external ritual of them? No, God has ordained the rituals of the sacraments, they are the means that our faith is expressed. Will this explanation satisfy everyone? No the debate that been going on in Protestant churches since Luther and Zwingli, but I hope at least to have done away with some misconceptions on the topic.

The Holy Spirit is, in fact, God. Rather than being some abstract power or force, he is an intelligent being. While I realize the English word “person” is somewhat inadequate in describing God, for lack of a better word, the Holy Spirit is a person in that he possesses the attributes of personality. Understanding the personality of the Spirit is key to comprehending his role in the church. If we fail to acknowledge him as a person, and instead view him simply as God’s power, we will never be able to understand his present-day function in the Body of Christ.

My wife and I came across a remarkably concise listing of counterfeit gospels over the weekend. I wanted to take the time to explore these in slightly more depth than where I originally saw them.

What is the process surrounding the development of texts into sacred scriptures, particularly in new religious movements? Additionally, what relation, if any, does this process have with the defining of orthodoxy? This series will examine these two movements as a re-imagining of what is nominally considered tradition, “the process of handing something on to another generation and that which is handed on” [Robert Murray, “Tradition and Sacred Texts,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 6:1 (Jan 2004): 4]

Several articles from different authors, both egalitarian and complimentarian, dealing with the role of women in the church.