As the pastor of a church community where many of our members are converts from Protestant Evangelicalism, I am sometimes asked about my view of the current Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues.  What follows is a part of my response. The practice of speaking in tongues (or “glossolalia”) is clearly Biblical.  On the day of Pentecost, the 120 were empowered by God to speak in foreign human languages they had never…

In an interview that was part of the BBC 2005 documentary on Auschwitz there is a chilling interview with a person (then quite old) who took part in the shooting of Jewish men, women, and children in Ukraine.  He said that he felt nothing when shooting them, “because my hatred toward the Jews was too great”, and this was because he felt his family had been treated badly by local Jews.  When…

I have just finished reading a volume published in 2017 entitled, In Search of Ancient Roots:  The Christian Past and the Evangelical Identity Crisis by the Presbyterian author Kenneth J. Stewart.  Dr. Stewart is, as the title of his book suggests, distressed at the modern phenomenon of Evangelicals leaving Evangelical churches to become Roman Catholics or Orthodox in their search for more ancient roots.  He writes from the Reformed perspective, being the…

I am told on good authority that it is offensive to invite people of other religions to convert to Christianity.  Thus it is offensive to say to a Jew, “Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God and so you should be baptized and become a Christian”.  It is similarly offensive to say to a Muslim, “Jesus is the divine Son of God and Muhammad was not a true prophet, nor…

One is tempted to say that it takes a fair bit of either courage or foolhardiness in our culture to write in praise of virginity.  But virginity is now so misunderstood and undervalued that some words need to be offered to understand it and recognize its proper value.  In our present culture (it was otherwise in the Jurassic days of my youth) virginity in adults is considered comical if not downright pathological.  …

There are stupider things to do than arguing with a culty fundamentalist.  As the late great Jim Croce reminded us, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger.  Arguing with a culty fundamentalist is, I admit, not as stupid as any of these things, but it is pretty stupid nonetheless, for it is a waste of precious…