In Leviticus 10:1-2, Levitical priests Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, offered God “strange” fire on the Lord’s altars. As a result of their unholy offering, the fire consumed them. Pastor John MacArthur uses this story in his book Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship to launch a broad critique of charismatic worship. While the scope of his cessationist argument goes too far for comfort, this story reminds

The New Calvinists of the Young, Restless, Reformed Movement (YYRM) burst into the public consciousness with Colin Hansen’s 2006 Christianity Today article and follow up book.1 I have recounted some of that history before and will not do so again at length here. In short, the YRRM was essentially a recovery of the doctrines of grace, sovereignty of God, and Calvinist soteriology (i.e. TULIP), predominately by evangelical Baptists. Since its inception, the YRRM has been frequently

In “Floating in the Forth”, Scott Hutchison of the Scottish indie rock band Frightened Rabbit, sings, Fully clothed, I’ll float away Down the Forth, into the sea I think I’ll save suicide for another day We hoped this “day” that Hutchison sang of would be indefinitely deferred. We wished that Hutchison’s life, which was accompanied by depression, would not have such a tragic end. But on May 11th, we learned that this day had come.

To take certain commentators’ reports at face value, the Museum of the Bible in downtown Washington, D.C. is just one small step removed from Ken Ham’s Creation Museum and Ark Encounter—an expressly sectarian environment cloaked in pseudo-neutrality. At least, that’s the line peddled by Candida Moss and Joel Baden, longtime critics of the project and authors of “Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby.” Echoing Moss and Baden, Vox writer Tara Isabella Burton similarly

CHRISTUS VICTOR AND THE OLD TESTAMENT Until A.D. 1200, Christians around the world all saw the cross as liberating believers from darkness. After A.D. 1200, Roman Catholics added the idea that God’s wrath and justice were satisfied by our Lord’s suffering and torture. That view of the cross dominates Protestant theology, and it does so with several misunderstandings. To summarize the previous article in this series: The term “Penal Substitutionary Atonement” is a misnomer, because

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God (Acts 1:1-3 NRSV). In music, a refrain is

It could be said that, throughout history and even now in the “less enlightened” parts of the world, the cults of the Saints drive not only the practice of Christianity but also speculation (in the older, more revered sense of the term) about Christianity itself. That is, hagiography as such – the vitae Sanctorum – is not a strange collection of bygone myths (in the newer, less revered sense of the term), but the pulse

Yesterday was Ascension Day, which means the Church’s fifty-day Easter celebration is nearing its end. Before we leave it behind for this liturgical year completely, let’s reflect on it one last time. If there is indeed a God, the next logical question is whether that God is knowable to us. And if he is knowable, does he care about us? The Christian tradition provides concrete answers to these questions. He is knowable, “he has spoken