Technology, especially communications technology, popularized theological expression.  Turn on the television and select your favorite preacher or Bible teacher.  If one does not suit your individual preference, switch to another; there are hundreds available.  Theological and academic credentials are no longer necessary to exegete the Full Counsel of God.   All that is necessary is to have an “experience” with God.  Diploma mills have risen to the occasion for those who want a theologica...

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God created human beings with unique learning abilities.  God gave man the rational ability to understand and communicate knowledge.  Some knowledge is innate that the Bible describes as “evident within them” (Romans 1:19).  They also learn by empirical experience.  The Bible explains in terms of “being understood through what has been made” (Romans1:20).   Isaac Watts identified five ways that rational creatures might use God’s gifts
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There are five eminent means, or methods, whereb...
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Have you heard someone say, “I don’t want doctrine or theology, I just want the Bible?”  The apostle Paul warned the church that “the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine.”  The word doctrine, as it is used in that text and many others, refers to instruction in the Christian faith.  Jesus commanded His church to “make disciples.”  The only way to make disciples is to instruct from the whole counsel of God.  Anyone who says, “I don’t want theology” means ...

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Thousands of sermons, teaching sessions, seminars, and lectures on the Christian religion and western philosophy in general have fallen upon my ears over the past forty years.   I’ve consumed hundreds of books and devoted the last one third of my life in study and research relative to the Christian religion.  God has graced me with an eternal relationship with Him through the Lord Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Until this day, God has given me an able body and sound mind to...

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We, most of the western world, live in the skepticism produced in the change from modernity to post modernity.  The rational intellectual perception of human development has  been absconded by the empirical suggestion that “image is everything.”  It is said that Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) “at thirteen years of age said he was enraptured by the reading of John Locke’s “An Essay of Human Understanding” (Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, p. 7).  I use that quote to sh...
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Advice for writers from an 18th century sage.

“If you have not the advantage of friends to survey your writings, then read them over yourself, and all the way consider what will be the sentence and judgment of all the various characters of mankind upon them:  think what one of your own party would say, or what would be the sense of an adversary; imagine what a curious or malicious man, what a captious or an envious critic, what a vulgar or a learned reader would object, either to the matter,...
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In 1926 Dr. J. Gresham Machen gave his testimony before the house and senate committees on the proposed Federal Department of Education.  Machen said, “We do not, I think, want a Federal Department of Education because such a department is in the interests of a principle of uniformity or standardization in education which, if put into practice, would be the very worst calamity into which this country could fall.”  The Federal Government, using greenbacks as leverage, eventually did what M...

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More than half of my life has been occupied with reading books.  Education is about reading, comprehension, and application of the acquired knowledge.  I'd like to share a little information about the need for theological education in the contemporary church.  I'll use the concepts used during the Puritan era in America so you will see the difference in the process used by the modern seminaries.

The English Reformation during the 17^th century was a struggle for ecclesiastical uniformity.  The ...
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