Learn about other faiths (from the people who actually practice them)

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photo © 2008 Peter Gibbons | more info (via: Wylio)   One of the most rewarding ventures in my quest for “biblical womanhood” is that I’ve stuck up an email correspondence with an Orthodox Jewish woman from Israel.  Over the past few months, Ahava has offered valuable insights on everything from interpreting Proverbs 31 to celebrating Passover to practicing family purity.  I’m not sure how I would have gotten through April without her!  Not lon... read more

Book Club Discussion: Big Important Questions

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Today we continue our discussion about Phyllis Tickle’s fascinating book, The Great Emergence. As we learned last week, Tickle’s premise is that the Church experiences a great paradigm shift every 500 years, and we are in the midst of one presently. According to Tickle, each time of re-formation has the same central question: Where, now is the authority?   During the Great Reformation, Christians challenged the authority of the Pope and rallied around the cry sola scri... read more

Survey Says: Don't Read Into It

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As you may have heard, a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life found that the majority of those affiliated with a religion do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. This includes 57 percent of evangelicals who say that many religions can lead to eternal life. It’s amazing to me how quickly this study has become fodder for evangelical outrage over relativism, particularly here in Dayton. To the collective gasps of their congregat... read more

Gays, Buddhists, and Scientists: Will Evangelicals Change Their Minds?

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In the 16th century, John Calvin argued on theological grounds that anyone who believed that the earth moved in space was “motivated by a spirit of bitterness, contradiction, and faultfinding; possessed by the devil.” *  In the 17th century, both Catholics and Protestants systematically executed Anabaptists for holding to the “heresy” that a confession of faith should precede baptism. Here in America, the original Southern Baptist Convention was organized, in part, b... read more

When a theology just doesn't feel right...

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This week’s posts challenge the fundamentalists position of exclusivism-the theology that salvation is available only to those who explicitly confess faith in Jesus Christ, leaving out the billions of people throughout history who either never heard of Jesus or who were raised in religious traditions other than Christianity. Having been taught my whole life that exclusivism was the only truly biblical position, I nearly gave up on the Christian faith altogether when my moral objections to ... read more

Some thoughts on those who "haven't heard"

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Despite my hesitancy to use selective passages of Scripture to “make a point” and my general aversion to bullet-points, I felt it necessary to include a more detailed presentation of a biblical alternative to exclusivism for the benefit of those readers who are themselves searching for one. I should mention that I am forever indebted to the scholarship of Clark Pinnock on this subject. His book, “A Wideness in God’s Mercy” (Zondervan, 1992) opened my eyes to the the... read more

Book Club Discussion: Is Jesus a Christian?

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In Chapter 12 of William P. Young’s The Shack, Jesus talks with the book’s protagonist, Mackenzie, about the inadequacy of institutions in bringing people closer to God. Jesus says, “Institutions, systems, ideologies, and all the vain, futile efforts of humanity that go with them are everywhere, and interaction with all of it is unavoidable. But I can give you freedom to overcome any system of power in which you find yourself, be it religious, economic, social, or political. Yo... read more

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