Bill Pratt | December 28, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you are worried, then it’s likely that you have not committed the unpardonable sin. This sin is first mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 12, verses 31-32, in the context of Jesus’s healing of a demon-possessed man. As always, when reading the Bible, we need to look at [...]
Bill Pratt | December 3, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Indeed there is. Here are just a handful of quotes from church fathers that seem to support the supremacy of the Scriptures over all other sources. Athanasius: “The holy and inspired Scriptures are fully sufficient for the proclamation of the truth.” Cyril of Jerusalem: “With regard to the divine and saving [...]
Bill Pratt | November 23, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you call yourself a Protestant Christian, then you’ve probably been taught at some point that Protestants believe in the principle of sola Scriptura. If you are Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, then you have been taught that you deny the principle of sola Scriptura. If we are going to have [...]
Bill Pratt | November 22, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Let’s get some facts out on the table about the Bible. The Bible is composed of some 66 separate documents that were written approximately between the years of 1500 BC to AD 100 in two primary languages (Hebrew and Greek), and produced in cultures and historical contexts that are radically different [...]
Bill Pratt | August 31, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Many passages in Scripture are relatively straight-forward to understand. A person of even minimal intelligence can read and understand much of the Bible. The greatest obstacle that faces readers of the Bible – the fact it was written in ancient Hebrew and Greek – is largely mitigated by the hard work [...]
Bill Pratt | August 29, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Relativism is a constant and ever-present danger these days. Today I’m speaking, in particular, about the interpretation of biblical texts. When we open the Bible and read, what happens if we interpret the text differently from those around us? There are scholars today who claim that nobody has the correct interpretation [...]
Bill Pratt | February 29, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we learned what exactly the unpardonable sin is – attributing to Satan what is accomplished by the Spirit of God. But what caused Jesus to give this stern warning to this particular group of people? It is important to understand so that we can know how [...]
Bill Pratt | December 16, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 2 we discovered the “German Christian” movement, a group that wanted to conform Christianity to German nationalism. In part 3, we complete our survey of this heretical campaign. Again, we draw heavily from Eric Metaxas’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Recall that the German Christians sought to radically reinterpret and [...]
Bill Pratt | December 15, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 we saw the plans that the National Socialists had for the German Lutheran Church during the 1930′s and 1940′s. In parts 2 and 3 we will review how the church reacted to the attempted Nazification of their doctrines and beliefs. Again, we draw heavily from Eric Metaxas’s excellent biography [...]
Bill Pratt | November 30, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I’ve mentioned Paul Copan’s book Is God a Moral Monster? before, but I ran across this video clip where historical Jesus scholar Mike Licona interviews Copan about alleged genocide in the Old Testament. Copan summarizes some very key arguments from his book during this informative clip.
