Category Archives: Contra

Where the Bible should reign in the ecclesiastical sphere so the the U.S. Constitution should reign in the civil sphere of these United States. Since starting this blog I have been told more times than I can count how multiple versions is a huge blessing for the American Church. It has been plainly stated andContinue reading “A New Constitution for a New Era in American Civil Life”

Over the past couple week we have been discussing, among other things, the fact that the Post-Reformation Reformed dogmaticians were aware of many of the textual variants that we wrestle with today. Some of the take-aways of these observation is that the Reformed Orthodox were aware of these variants and still argued for a standardContinue reading “What About Mark 16:9-20, John 7:53-8:11, and I John 5:7?”

Over the last 5 years I have had the opportunity to teach at Trinity Baptist College in Jacksonville, FL the faculty of which is quite eclectic. For four years I taught on campus and have this last year started to teach online. In the opportunities in which I had to teach Bibliology or something inContinue reading “This Is What the Church Sounds Like.”

There is an interesting and regularly observable dichotomy found in the major tenets of modern evangelical textual criticism. On the one hand you have modern evangelical text-critics saying, “…the copies of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and others from the ancient world have produced adequate copies for us to know what they taught. And as shown below,Continue reading “How Many Witnesses Do We Really Have?”

As we continue our survey of contemporary “meaningful textual variants” known and answered hundreds of years, we turn now to 1 John 4:3. Turretin observes that the text can be read, “Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” or as the Latin translates it, “every spirit that denies Jesus.”Continue reading “I John 4:3: Is it “Deny” or “Confess”?”

It has often puzzled me why an appeal to reading as “earlier” somehow trumped most claims to different but “later” readings. Consider the following quote from Wasserman and Gurry’s book, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, “Reading a, on the other hand, is not attested until the ninthContinue reading “What Do You Mean by “Earlier Readings”?”

Whether you run in popular evangelical circles or not your most likely have heard of Andy Stanley, son of Charles Stanley. Andy Stanley has over the years made some notable and provocative statements about the Bible. On June 13, 2014 Stanley tweeted, “Why we must teach the next generation the FOUNDATION of our faith isContinue reading “So We Got To Talk About Andy Stanley”

As it was in the time of Turretin so it is in our time that we discuss whether the ending or doxology of the Lord’s prayer is original. Pointing out again, these debates are not new. It is not like the originality of the Lord’s prayer was something modern scholars fortuitously stumbled upon in theirContinue reading “Luke vs. Matthew and the End of the Lord’s Prayer”

Setting aside the fact that autographs are in one respect the words of God and the preaching of the word so long as it accords with God’s revealed words is also in one respect the word of God, in what sense do we say that men’s words are God’s words? Before there ever was creationContinue reading “When Ought We to Call Men’s Word, God’s Words”