The Moving Option
I get weekly phone calls and emails from people seriously hungry for a Free Grace church. They don’t have one in their area, and they suffer for it. Bob and I usually encourage people to begin a Bible study at home and grow from there. But that is hard to do. Or we tell them […]
Cottrell’s Continuing Assurance
In his book, His Truth: Scripture Truths About Basic Doctrines, Jack Cottrell, an Arminian theologian, wrote on the subject of assurance. He did not give a name for the view he defended. I think it would be appropriate to call it the “I hope I keep believing” view. On Cottrell’s view, salvation is by faith […]
Jack Cottrell Hopes He Will Keep Believing
Jack Cottrell is an Arminian theologian. If you want to read a serious Arminian, start with him. Cottrell wrote a summary of his beliefs—a short systematic theology—called His Truth: Scriptural Truths About Basic Doctrines. The last chapter is on assurance. At the beginning of the chapter, he identified two prominent errors regarding assurance. The first […]
Jack Cottrell Confuses Eternal Security and Perseverance
Jack Cottrell is an Arminian writer and theologian. He writes from within the Stone-Campbell tradition. If you’d like to read an Arminian who believes in inerrancy and tries to be a Biblical theologian, I recommend his work (though, not all his conclusions!). His Truth: Scriptural Truths About Basic Doctrines is Cottrell’s short (116 pages) summary […]
Give Paige Patterson a Fair Hearing
Paige Patterson was recently demoted, then fired, as President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. There was intense one-sided coverage, followed by a quick decision by SWBTS. Personally, I’m always suspicious when “justice” is mostly tried in Social Media. I’m especially suspicious when only one side is covered. And frankly, I’m also on guard when a […]
We All Stumble — James 2:10; 3:2; 4:17
The idea that James teaches the necessity of good works to be eternally saved comes up against a very strong objection: James says that absolutely no one is qualified to be saved on the basis of their works. On the one hand, James emphasizes that we all sin. For we all stumble in many ways […]
Universalism and 1 Corinthians 15:22
First Corinthians 15:22 is a favorite verse for univeralists: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive (1 Cor 15:22). Universalists say that “all” in Adam is co-extensive with the “all” in Christ. Hence, since all of humanity died in Adam, so, too, all of humanity will be […]
J. I. Packer and The Bondage of Tradition
J. I. Packer, the famed Reformed Anglican theologian, has written more book forewords than anyone I know. It seems that every book published by a Calvinist either has a foreword or an endorsement written by Packer. Packer, along with O. R. Johnston, translated Martin Luther’s The Bondage of the Will (Westwood, NJ: Revell, 1957). They […]
Splash Pad or Trash Pad?
I took my kids to a newly opened splash pad or “sprayground” in town. It opened on May 12th. I took them the next day, on May 13th. What is a splash pad? Think of a half-basketball court with different kinds of sprinklers. The water shoots from nozzles in the ground, pours down from buckets […]
Tartarus — 2 Peter 2:4
The Bible is much stranger than people allow. That’s where theology can go wrong—by trying to make it less strange than it is. I have been exploring the topic of “hell” in a series of blog posts, explaining the Biblical reasons that lead me to accept eternal conscious torment (ECT) over and against annihilationism and […]