Mark Kreitzer | Kosin University (original) (raw)

Papers by Mark Kreitzer

Introduction: Romans 4 The Lord God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many peoples ... more Introduction: Romans 4 The Lord God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many peoples (Gn 17:4-5). Paul correctly interprets this to mean that he would be the father of all, both the Jews and gentilic peoples, including all clans and ethnies. In other words, Paul states that Abraham is father of believers who are from both "uncircumcised" and "circumcised" ethno-religious groups (Rom 4:11-12). Paul further explains this to mean that Abraham would be the "heir of the world" (Rom 4:13). The "world" in the context does not mean merely a social system outside of the institutional church. Instead in the context, Paul explains the meaning of "world" [ko, smoj] to be "many nations" [pollw/ n ev qnw/ n]. Here he is explicitly alluding to Genesis 17:4-5 [path. r plh, qouj ev qnw/ n, LXX]. The promise to all the seed of Abraham, then, is that Abraham would become the father of "us all" [path. r pa, ntwn hmw/ n]. "All" includes equal access to a free gift of righteousness for both Jews and "Greeks," that is non-Jewish, idolatrous ethnies (see also Gal 3:1-17). This is a key theme throughout Romans (Schirrmacher 1993).

Global Missiology English, 2020

Does pistis Christou, in crucial contexts in Paul’s letters, mean “faith in Christ,” “faithfulnes... more Does pistis Christou, in crucial contexts in Paul’s letters, mean “faith in Christ,” “faithfulness of Christ, or “steadfast-faith of Christ”? I choose the third of these alternatives. It correlates well with the biblical doctrine of the active and suffering obedience of Christ. Moreover, the “steadfast-faith of Christ” is not merely for guilt-oriented peoples (Rom 3:29-31). It is essential to Paul’s “gospel” and is paradigmatic for all nations (Rom 2:16). Paul was Christ’s chosen emissary and was given a message and power to proclaim that divine gospel to idol worshippers. Consequently, anyone proclaiming another gospel must be cursed (Gal 1:6-9, 2:7-8).

Global Missiology English, 2016

Our Father-God desires that we strip the core truths of the Gospel from Western culture’s husk an... more Our Father-God desires that we strip the core truths of the Gospel from Western culture’s husk and cleanse them from any syncretistic impurities in the core message. Only then can the purified, inner, life-giving seed (Lk 8:11) be re-contextualized into understandable forms in order to flourish in every other ethno-linguistic group on earth (Jn 1:11-12; see 1 Cor 9:19-23). Certainly, the biblical doctrine of Father-God is at the very core of that Gospel seed we are called to sow (1 Pet 1:23; Jn 17:1-3). The Bible also teaches that knowing Father-God comes by the “ordinary means” of clear Scripture because knowing him is “necessary . . . for salvation” (WCF 1.7; Jn 14:6, 17:3). Certainly, not every passage is as clear as every other, but clear passages must interpret any unclear pericope (e.g., WCF 1.7) without reading into any passage non-biblical, cultural presuppositions.

The late Paul G. Hiebert gives us an excellent, must-read introduction to “how people change” in ... more The late Paul G. Hiebert gives us an excellent, must-read introduction to “how people change” in Transforming Worldviews. As a comprehensive introduction to world-view theory, it possesses many flashes of brilliance and is the high point of his long, out-standing career as a missionary anthropologist. First, he defines and analyzes the concept of worldview as it has been developed by the social sciences. Next, Hiebert summarizes and critiques several worldviews that missionaries must engage today, from the world-view of small-scale societies, to peasant worldviews, to modernity, postmodernity, post-postmodernity, and the emerging glocal context of twenty-first century ministry. Hiebert addresses the impact of each on Christianity and mission and then lastly gives a brief out-line for developing a biblical worldview in order to engage, critique, and help transform non-Christian worldviews. Finally, he argues for a gospel-based mission that seeks to transform the worldviews of its recipients and offers suggestions for how to do so.

Global Missiology English, 2017

Uche Anizor (PhD, Wheaton College) and Hank Voss (PhD, Wheaton College) come eminently qualified ... more Uche Anizor (PhD, Wheaton College) and Hank Voss (PhD, Wheaton College) come eminently qualified to speak about the priesthood of believers, a term popularized by Martin Luther but a biblical concept rarely understood and practiced over the centuries. Anizor is an associate professor of biblical and theological studies at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and author of a book on a related topic: Kings and Priests: Scripture’s Theological Account of Its Readers. Hank Voss, on the other hand, is a theological practitioner as national church planting direct at World Impact and senior national staff with The Urban Ministry Institute of Los Angeles. Both have a passion for the topic and a vested interest in seeing the body of Christ put into practice the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Their desire is to develop a “theological vision” (21) of the doctrine of the people of God as priests in God’s kingdom as part of their “identity in Jesus Christ” (21)....

This work examines biblically and convenantally the origin, goal, dynamics, and role that ethnici... more This work examines biblically and convenantally the origin, goal, dynamics, and role that ethnicity has played in multi-ethnic contexts in missional, civil, and ecclesial spheres. Through a biblical-theological survey of the Old Testment, this work demonstrates that Yahweh mandates a centrifugal and centripetal missional force. The New Testament continues the promise of success among individuals and peoples with the Holy Spirit's power. In both the ecclesial and socio-political spheres covenantal ([con]federal) structures best balance human-unity and ethno-diversity. Both reflect God's triune nature. In Christ, thus, both visible structural identity and real self-determining, self-propagating, self-financing, and self-theologizing diversity in church and state are necessary.

Global Missiology English, 2010

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Evangelicals have always had to work within a pluralistic con... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Evangelicals have always had to work within a pluralistic context in the so-called Southern and Eastern worlds. However, in the last fifty years world religious pluralism has increasingly come home to the West. This cutting edge collection of essays, concerning evangelical witness to various world religions, addresses both contexts.

Global Missiology English, 2010

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 William Webb (Th.D., Dallas Theological Seminary) is professo... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 William Webb (Th.D., Dallas Theological Seminary) is professor of New Testament at Heritage Theological Seminary. His desire in this path-breaking volume is to introduce into the evangelical academic world a method of interpretation, which he terms a “redemptive- movement” hermeneutic. This perspective on hermeneutics, however, is not new. It was first sys­ tematized in the 1950’s by Swedish theologian and Emeritus Harvard Professor, Krister Stendahl (1921-2008) with the term “trajectory hermeneutic.” 1

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pastor-theologian, Robert Letham, comes well prepared for his... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pastor-theologian, Robert Letham, comes well prepared for his task, one which evangelicals have greatly neglected for many decades. With a Ph. D. from Aberdeen University in Scotland and full-time Presbyterian Pastorate, Letham approaches the Trinity with both a deep scholarly yet a very personal and pastoral approach. One of the most outstanding features is that Letham is both very thorough and discerning, yet at the same time gracious and as fair as is possible, as we shall see. Another excellent feature that he brings to the task is judicious biblical exegesis, which, unfortunately, is unusual for a book on the Trinity. The first large section of the volume (up to page 84) develops the incipient Trinitarianism in the Old Testament. Next, he analyzes Jesus’ relationship with the Father in the Johannine and Pauline writings. Last, he furnishes an excellent excursus on the “Ternary Patterns in Ephesians.”

Global Missiology English, 2016

Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims are Falling in Love with Jesus by vete... more Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims are Falling in Love with Jesus by veteran missionary strategist Dr. Jerry Trousdale is an outstanding and inspiring book. It is the first installment of a planned three-part trilogy on reaching Muslim’s using Church Planting Movement (CPM) and Discovery Bible Study (DBS) methodology.

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oxford educated scholar, Richard Fletcher, has produced anoth... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oxford educated scholar, Richard Fletcher, has produced another outstanding volume: The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity . Evangelicals have been accused of many things, but one censure that may well stick is their lack of historical perspective. This failing can be alleviated by reading Fletcher’s outstanding volume on the history of the conversion of barbarian Europe to the Roman or Byzantine forms of Christianity. It is packed full of insights that challenge many of the presuppositions of Evangelicals at several levels. Second, it fills up with great detail the European gaps in what K. S. Latourette calls The Thousand Years of Uncertainty .

Global Missiology English, 2016

This present comparison between volumes by Oxford Mathematics Professor, John Len-nox and Civil E... more This present comparison between volumes by Oxford Mathematics Professor, John Len-nox and Civil Engineer, Philip Stott is the last of this series of articles on evangelicalism’s syn-cretism with modernity’s epistemology. It will be the most controversial. Modernity’s founda-tional presupposition begins with autonomous human observations. Humanity, it then postulates, can correctly make all the right connections and relationships between the various data points humans observe. Out of these observations, modern humans believe that they then can correctly discern aspects of history, cosmogony, and cosmology that can overturn centuries old readings of Scripture based on classic hermeneutical principles. Based on these autonomously discerned connections and relationships, modernity-bound humans and modernity-bound evangelicals who adopt its empiricist epistemology believe they can now give the true story of the universe. They assume that they can also provide the accurate meaning of the ...

Global Missiology English, 2010

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Christopher J. H. Wright’s book, Old Testament Ethics for the... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Christopher J. H. Wright’s book, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God , is an excel­lent volume that explores and attempts to apply many of the Old Testament ethical paradigms. The work he has done in this field is desperately needed for application both in two-thirds and first-world cultures. As a former missionary to India and social ethicist, Wright integrates both field experience and a scholarly understanding of both ancient and modern cultures into his work. I use it as a key textbook along with Walter Kaiser’s, Toward Old Testament Ethics (Kai­ ser 1983) 1 in a Ph. D. seminar on Intercultural Ethics.

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Christopher J. H. Wright has given us another masterpiece.

Corruption, pain, nakedness, sickness, death and the state of existing as a disembodied spirit ar... more Corruption, pain, nakedness, sickness, death and the state of existing as a disembodied spirit are abnormal to God’s original design and involve shame, that is dishonor and lack of glory. All nakedness that is abused or violated is a deliberate attempt to destroy the honor of the one attacked and to gain more power and honor in a twisted manner for self. The result is a profound personal shame and feelings of guilt in the created conscience of the abused. The father of shame, Satan, uses this violence to sow accusations of shame and doubts of value/worth in the mind and spirit of the abused and before people and God. The same occurs concerning a violated person’s gender identity if same sex abuse occurs. Ultimately, the Destroyer sows doubt about the goodness of the Creator because each person is created to thank, glorify, trust, and follow him alone and to receive glory and acceptance only from him (Rom 1:18-31).

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Thomas Kuhn’s study, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuh... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Thomas Kuhn’s study, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970), helped spark a virtual revolution in the epistemology of science. Using a philosophically idealist, post-Kantian per­ spective, Kuhn and others are attempting to demonstrate that there is no steady progress forward in knowledge in the natural sciences. Instead, movement comes often as a series of paradigmatic shifts, yet with no necessary implication of a forward direction. Using this framework, many have now come to believe that all types of scientific knowledge are paradigm dependent. There­fore, all scientific factuality is theory laden, and every fact is an interpreted fact. The result is, in the words of an old Simon and Garfunkel song, “Every man hears what he wants to hear and dis­ regards the rest.” This article desires to point a Scriptural way forward, away from this post- modernist relativism and the naive Realism of evangelicalism, bound as it is by modernity. I have...

As I have written in previous reviews, too many evangelical scientists as well as most theologian... more As I have written in previous reviews, too many evangelical scientists as well as most theologians and missiologists are so often bound by the epistemology of Modernity. This syncretism is so blinding because it encapsulates the pre-conscious worldview presuppositions of Western culture. Yet if we believe that the value and epistemic system of the surrounding idolatrous cultures “lies in the wicked one” and that they are “held captive to him to do his will” (1 Jn 5:19; 2 Tim 2:26; see Eph 2:1; 2 Cor 4:4), why should we accommodate it? I don’t say this flippantly because the god of this age does indeed hold people’s minds in darkness lest they see the glory of the Creator-God in the face of Jesus, the very Word of the Father. The central thesis of this volume of fourteen articles is that modernity’s concept of deep time, and all the surrounding worldview shifts it has brought, has been devastating to theodicy. It is my opinion that any syncretism with deep time also shatters real G...

Why would I review this volume that is so theological in an online journal emphasizing missiology... more Why would I review this volume that is so theological in an online journal emphasizing missiology and the task of taking the Good News to all clans, peoples, and languages? It is because the Gospel of our Lord Jesus is so intertwined with the message of the biblical covenants that to attempt to separate and isolate the pure Gospel from either the legal covenant in the Garden or the covenant word promised to Abraham will destroy both Gospel and covenant. The Good News that missiology is about is a covenant bound word. The more we understand the biblical theology of the covenant the more we can both understand and apply its covenant Gospel and its ethic to every ethno-culture on earth.

Global Missiology English, 2013

Copernicus and Galileo laid down the gauntlet for Evangelical Christians believing in the inerran... more Copernicus and Galileo laid down the gauntlet for Evangelical Christians believing in the inerrancy of Scripture. Are the Scriptures perspicuous with respect to cosmology, cosmogony (origins), and the age of the earth? Many since that time have made a step by step retreat from the absolute authority of the Bible, while thinking that the Gospel message is still being preserved. It is no different with the contemporary generation.

Introduction: Romans 4 The Lord God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many peoples ... more Introduction: Romans 4 The Lord God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many peoples (Gn 17:4-5). Paul correctly interprets this to mean that he would be the father of all, both the Jews and gentilic peoples, including all clans and ethnies. In other words, Paul states that Abraham is father of believers who are from both "uncircumcised" and "circumcised" ethno-religious groups (Rom 4:11-12). Paul further explains this to mean that Abraham would be the "heir of the world" (Rom 4:13). The "world" in the context does not mean merely a social system outside of the institutional church. Instead in the context, Paul explains the meaning of "world" [ko, smoj] to be "many nations" [pollw/ n ev qnw/ n]. Here he is explicitly alluding to Genesis 17:4-5 [path. r plh, qouj ev qnw/ n, LXX]. The promise to all the seed of Abraham, then, is that Abraham would become the father of "us all" [path. r pa, ntwn hmw/ n]. "All" includes equal access to a free gift of righteousness for both Jews and "Greeks," that is non-Jewish, idolatrous ethnies (see also Gal 3:1-17). This is a key theme throughout Romans (Schirrmacher 1993).

Global Missiology English, 2020

Does pistis Christou, in crucial contexts in Paul’s letters, mean “faith in Christ,” “faithfulnes... more Does pistis Christou, in crucial contexts in Paul’s letters, mean “faith in Christ,” “faithfulness of Christ, or “steadfast-faith of Christ”? I choose the third of these alternatives. It correlates well with the biblical doctrine of the active and suffering obedience of Christ. Moreover, the “steadfast-faith of Christ” is not merely for guilt-oriented peoples (Rom 3:29-31). It is essential to Paul’s “gospel” and is paradigmatic for all nations (Rom 2:16). Paul was Christ’s chosen emissary and was given a message and power to proclaim that divine gospel to idol worshippers. Consequently, anyone proclaiming another gospel must be cursed (Gal 1:6-9, 2:7-8).

Global Missiology English, 2016

Our Father-God desires that we strip the core truths of the Gospel from Western culture’s husk an... more Our Father-God desires that we strip the core truths of the Gospel from Western culture’s husk and cleanse them from any syncretistic impurities in the core message. Only then can the purified, inner, life-giving seed (Lk 8:11) be re-contextualized into understandable forms in order to flourish in every other ethno-linguistic group on earth (Jn 1:11-12; see 1 Cor 9:19-23). Certainly, the biblical doctrine of Father-God is at the very core of that Gospel seed we are called to sow (1 Pet 1:23; Jn 17:1-3). The Bible also teaches that knowing Father-God comes by the “ordinary means” of clear Scripture because knowing him is “necessary . . . for salvation” (WCF 1.7; Jn 14:6, 17:3). Certainly, not every passage is as clear as every other, but clear passages must interpret any unclear pericope (e.g., WCF 1.7) without reading into any passage non-biblical, cultural presuppositions.

The late Paul G. Hiebert gives us an excellent, must-read introduction to “how people change” in ... more The late Paul G. Hiebert gives us an excellent, must-read introduction to “how people change” in Transforming Worldviews. As a comprehensive introduction to world-view theory, it possesses many flashes of brilliance and is the high point of his long, out-standing career as a missionary anthropologist. First, he defines and analyzes the concept of worldview as it has been developed by the social sciences. Next, Hiebert summarizes and critiques several worldviews that missionaries must engage today, from the world-view of small-scale societies, to peasant worldviews, to modernity, postmodernity, post-postmodernity, and the emerging glocal context of twenty-first century ministry. Hiebert addresses the impact of each on Christianity and mission and then lastly gives a brief out-line for developing a biblical worldview in order to engage, critique, and help transform non-Christian worldviews. Finally, he argues for a gospel-based mission that seeks to transform the worldviews of its recipients and offers suggestions for how to do so.

Global Missiology English, 2017

Uche Anizor (PhD, Wheaton College) and Hank Voss (PhD, Wheaton College) come eminently qualified ... more Uche Anizor (PhD, Wheaton College) and Hank Voss (PhD, Wheaton College) come eminently qualified to speak about the priesthood of believers, a term popularized by Martin Luther but a biblical concept rarely understood and practiced over the centuries. Anizor is an associate professor of biblical and theological studies at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and author of a book on a related topic: Kings and Priests: Scripture’s Theological Account of Its Readers. Hank Voss, on the other hand, is a theological practitioner as national church planting direct at World Impact and senior national staff with The Urban Ministry Institute of Los Angeles. Both have a passion for the topic and a vested interest in seeing the body of Christ put into practice the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Their desire is to develop a “theological vision” (21) of the doctrine of the people of God as priests in God’s kingdom as part of their “identity in Jesus Christ” (21)....

This work examines biblically and convenantally the origin, goal, dynamics, and role that ethnici... more This work examines biblically and convenantally the origin, goal, dynamics, and role that ethnicity has played in multi-ethnic contexts in missional, civil, and ecclesial spheres. Through a biblical-theological survey of the Old Testment, this work demonstrates that Yahweh mandates a centrifugal and centripetal missional force. The New Testament continues the promise of success among individuals and peoples with the Holy Spirit's power. In both the ecclesial and socio-political spheres covenantal ([con]federal) structures best balance human-unity and ethno-diversity. Both reflect God's triune nature. In Christ, thus, both visible structural identity and real self-determining, self-propagating, self-financing, and self-theologizing diversity in church and state are necessary.

Global Missiology English, 2010

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Evangelicals have always had to work within a pluralistic con... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Evangelicals have always had to work within a pluralistic context in the so-called Southern and Eastern worlds. However, in the last fifty years world religious pluralism has increasingly come home to the West. This cutting edge collection of essays, concerning evangelical witness to various world religions, addresses both contexts.

Global Missiology English, 2010

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 William Webb (Th.D., Dallas Theological Seminary) is professo... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 William Webb (Th.D., Dallas Theological Seminary) is professor of New Testament at Heritage Theological Seminary. His desire in this path-breaking volume is to introduce into the evangelical academic world a method of interpretation, which he terms a “redemptive- movement” hermeneutic. This perspective on hermeneutics, however, is not new. It was first sys­ tematized in the 1950’s by Swedish theologian and Emeritus Harvard Professor, Krister Stendahl (1921-2008) with the term “trajectory hermeneutic.” 1

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pastor-theologian, Robert Letham, comes well prepared for his... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pastor-theologian, Robert Letham, comes well prepared for his task, one which evangelicals have greatly neglected for many decades. With a Ph. D. from Aberdeen University in Scotland and full-time Presbyterian Pastorate, Letham approaches the Trinity with both a deep scholarly yet a very personal and pastoral approach. One of the most outstanding features is that Letham is both very thorough and discerning, yet at the same time gracious and as fair as is possible, as we shall see. Another excellent feature that he brings to the task is judicious biblical exegesis, which, unfortunately, is unusual for a book on the Trinity. The first large section of the volume (up to page 84) develops the incipient Trinitarianism in the Old Testament. Next, he analyzes Jesus’ relationship with the Father in the Johannine and Pauline writings. Last, he furnishes an excellent excursus on the “Ternary Patterns in Ephesians.”

Global Missiology English, 2016

Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims are Falling in Love with Jesus by vete... more Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims are Falling in Love with Jesus by veteran missionary strategist Dr. Jerry Trousdale is an outstanding and inspiring book. It is the first installment of a planned three-part trilogy on reaching Muslim’s using Church Planting Movement (CPM) and Discovery Bible Study (DBS) methodology.

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oxford educated scholar, Richard Fletcher, has produced anoth... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oxford educated scholar, Richard Fletcher, has produced another outstanding volume: The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity . Evangelicals have been accused of many things, but one censure that may well stick is their lack of historical perspective. This failing can be alleviated by reading Fletcher’s outstanding volume on the history of the conversion of barbarian Europe to the Roman or Byzantine forms of Christianity. It is packed full of insights that challenge many of the presuppositions of Evangelicals at several levels. Second, it fills up with great detail the European gaps in what K. S. Latourette calls The Thousand Years of Uncertainty .

Global Missiology English, 2016

This present comparison between volumes by Oxford Mathematics Professor, John Len-nox and Civil E... more This present comparison between volumes by Oxford Mathematics Professor, John Len-nox and Civil Engineer, Philip Stott is the last of this series of articles on evangelicalism’s syn-cretism with modernity’s epistemology. It will be the most controversial. Modernity’s founda-tional presupposition begins with autonomous human observations. Humanity, it then postulates, can correctly make all the right connections and relationships between the various data points humans observe. Out of these observations, modern humans believe that they then can correctly discern aspects of history, cosmogony, and cosmology that can overturn centuries old readings of Scripture based on classic hermeneutical principles. Based on these autonomously discerned connections and relationships, modernity-bound humans and modernity-bound evangelicals who adopt its empiricist epistemology believe they can now give the true story of the universe. They assume that they can also provide the accurate meaning of the ...

Global Missiology English, 2010

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Christopher J. H. Wright’s book, Old Testament Ethics for the... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Christopher J. H. Wright’s book, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God , is an excel­lent volume that explores and attempts to apply many of the Old Testament ethical paradigms. The work he has done in this field is desperately needed for application both in two-thirds and first-world cultures. As a former missionary to India and social ethicist, Wright integrates both field experience and a scholarly understanding of both ancient and modern cultures into his work. I use it as a key textbook along with Walter Kaiser’s, Toward Old Testament Ethics (Kai­ ser 1983) 1 in a Ph. D. seminar on Intercultural Ethics.

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Christopher J. H. Wright has given us another masterpiece.

Corruption, pain, nakedness, sickness, death and the state of existing as a disembodied spirit ar... more Corruption, pain, nakedness, sickness, death and the state of existing as a disembodied spirit are abnormal to God’s original design and involve shame, that is dishonor and lack of glory. All nakedness that is abused or violated is a deliberate attempt to destroy the honor of the one attacked and to gain more power and honor in a twisted manner for self. The result is a profound personal shame and feelings of guilt in the created conscience of the abused. The father of shame, Satan, uses this violence to sow accusations of shame and doubts of value/worth in the mind and spirit of the abused and before people and God. The same occurs concerning a violated person’s gender identity if same sex abuse occurs. Ultimately, the Destroyer sows doubt about the goodness of the Creator because each person is created to thank, glorify, trust, and follow him alone and to receive glory and acceptance only from him (Rom 1:18-31).

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Thomas Kuhn’s study, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuh... more Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Thomas Kuhn’s study, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970), helped spark a virtual revolution in the epistemology of science. Using a philosophically idealist, post-Kantian per­ spective, Kuhn and others are attempting to demonstrate that there is no steady progress forward in knowledge in the natural sciences. Instead, movement comes often as a series of paradigmatic shifts, yet with no necessary implication of a forward direction. Using this framework, many have now come to believe that all types of scientific knowledge are paradigm dependent. There­fore, all scientific factuality is theory laden, and every fact is an interpreted fact. The result is, in the words of an old Simon and Garfunkel song, “Every man hears what he wants to hear and dis­ regards the rest.” This article desires to point a Scriptural way forward, away from this post- modernist relativism and the naive Realism of evangelicalism, bound as it is by modernity. I have...

As I have written in previous reviews, too many evangelical scientists as well as most theologian... more As I have written in previous reviews, too many evangelical scientists as well as most theologians and missiologists are so often bound by the epistemology of Modernity. This syncretism is so blinding because it encapsulates the pre-conscious worldview presuppositions of Western culture. Yet if we believe that the value and epistemic system of the surrounding idolatrous cultures “lies in the wicked one” and that they are “held captive to him to do his will” (1 Jn 5:19; 2 Tim 2:26; see Eph 2:1; 2 Cor 4:4), why should we accommodate it? I don’t say this flippantly because the god of this age does indeed hold people’s minds in darkness lest they see the glory of the Creator-God in the face of Jesus, the very Word of the Father. The central thesis of this volume of fourteen articles is that modernity’s concept of deep time, and all the surrounding worldview shifts it has brought, has been devastating to theodicy. It is my opinion that any syncretism with deep time also shatters real G...

Why would I review this volume that is so theological in an online journal emphasizing missiology... more Why would I review this volume that is so theological in an online journal emphasizing missiology and the task of taking the Good News to all clans, peoples, and languages? It is because the Gospel of our Lord Jesus is so intertwined with the message of the biblical covenants that to attempt to separate and isolate the pure Gospel from either the legal covenant in the Garden or the covenant word promised to Abraham will destroy both Gospel and covenant. The Good News that missiology is about is a covenant bound word. The more we understand the biblical theology of the covenant the more we can both understand and apply its covenant Gospel and its ethic to every ethno-culture on earth.

Global Missiology English, 2013

Copernicus and Galileo laid down the gauntlet for Evangelical Christians believing in the inerran... more Copernicus and Galileo laid down the gauntlet for Evangelical Christians believing in the inerrancy of Scripture. Are the Scriptures perspicuous with respect to cosmology, cosmogony (origins), and the age of the earth? Many since that time have made a step by step retreat from the absolute authority of the Bible, while thinking that the Gospel message is still being preserved. It is no different with the contemporary generation.