Though early Christianity experienced persecution externally from Jews, pagans, and the Roman state, it also battled internal enemies: false teachers and heresies.  Among the earliest challenges to the faith was a denial, not of Jesus’ being God, but of His being truly human!It appears that denial of Jesus’ humanity had philosophical roots in the notion held by some of the ancients that matter was...  Read More

I’ve decided to take a few blogs to lay out what I believe are interesting events in church history that Christians should be aware of.The Great Fire of Rome (AD 64) burned for six days and seven nights.  Just when they thought they had it under control, it broke out again.  It appears to have burned for three more days. Only four of Rome’s fourteen districts (about 29% of the city) escaped the fi...  Read More

Is it good or evil?Is it moral or immoral?Is it legal or illegal?Is it wise or foolish?Those are the four spectrums of decision-making. For Christians (or perhaps religious people, in general) there is one more:  Is it holy or common?Sometimes we run all our terminology together, as though good, right, moral, wise, and holy are all exactly the same thing.  Though they may be related, they aren’t i...  Read More

Is the thing I want to do legal or illegal (government standards)?Is the thing I want to do moral or immoral (societal standards)?Is the thing I want to do good or evil (God’s standards)?Those are the questions I ask when making hard decisions.  I would expect that all I need to do is line up the good poles and my decision would be easy.  If a thing is good, moral, and legal, why would I not do it...  Read More

In making moral decisions we try to line up three spectrums (good and evil, moral and immoral, legal and illegal) and ideally, we try to do what is good, moral, and legal.  When those three things line up, the decision is easy.  When they don’t line up—and often they don’t—moral decision-making gets complicated.For example, sometimes actions are good, but illegal:  hiding Jews in Nazi-occupied lan...  Read More

Since May 12th I’ve been building a blog series on moral decision-making.  At the foundation of moral decision-making is goodness, determined by the character of God, and evil, a distortion of God’s goodness toward an end that opposes His design or intention.When good and evil are applied in our world, we tend to speak of it as right and wrong.  An act is right when it conforms to the goodness in ...  Read More

The principle behind God's law doesn't change, only its clothing does — and the work of finding the right clothing for our own time, our own place in history, falls to us. It’s not an exact science.  It’s a practical one—people in a community learning from one another, refining our stances and building connections among us as we go.  Let me use a test case to explain what I mean.  Let’s talk about...  Read More

Good and evil are determined by the conformity of a thought or act to God’s character. When we bring principles of good and evil into our concrete world and apply them to particular behaviors we tend to call good “right” and evil “wrong”.  In everyday thinking, we judge right and wrong in two key places:  morals and law.Let’s discuss morals by which I mean those behaviors judged by the individual ...  Read More

Some people equate the law of Moses with the eternal law of God (true good and evil).  But the New Testament makes clear that the Law of Moses (or at least a portion of it) is not eternal—and was never intended to be.  Jesus declared all unclean foods “clean” (Mark 7.19 cf. Acts 10.15).  Paul says the cross “abolish[ed] the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Ephesians 2.15) and that “[G...  Read More

When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it.  (Deuteronomy 22.8)Here’s an unusual law that makes no sense to us upon first reading.  A parapet is a small wall built at the edge of a roof.  Why would we want to add a small wall to the edge of the roof of our house?  It makes no sense to ...  Read More

Good and evil are absolutes determined by God’s character.  Christians should always seek to align character and behavior with God’s character, with that which is good.Christianity, however, throws a monkey wrench into that endeavor.  Catholics called it “original sin”.  Protestants called it “total depravity”.  Christian theology in general refers to it as “spiritual death”.  When God said “In th...  Read More

If God is good and everything He created is good (Genesis 1.31), then God did not create evil.  What, then, is evil, and where did it come from? The answer is simple: evil has to be a good that has somehow “gone wrong”.  This is consistent with the opening chapters of Genesis.In Genesis 2.18, God says “it is not good that man should be alone”.  In the midst of the creation process where everything...  Read More