Bill Pratt | August 3, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, Tim Keller presented historian N. T. Wright’s analysis of Jewish and Greco-Roman attitudes toward an individual resurrection. Would the ancient world have accepted the story of Jesus’s resurrection without serious skepticism? According to Keller, Wright’s research indicates that the Greco-Roman world would not have been [...]
Bill Pratt | August 1, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt A common claim of resurrection skeptics is that the people who lived in first century Palestine and the surrounding Roman Empire would believe just about anything. They would have easily embraced the story of Jesus’ resurrection without thinking twice. So, for the early proponents of Christianity who thought they really saw [...]
Bill Pratt | July 18, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In a recent post, we discussed the fact that whenever a person makes something or someone their highest love in place of God, divisiveness occurs. Tim Keller, in stark fashion, also shows us what the other negative effects of placing our faith in these God substitutes can be. Here is an [...]
Bill Pratt | July 13, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have just completed reading The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, which has provided me much material for the blog in recent days. In one powerful section of the book, Keller carefully draws out the distinction between one definition of “religion” and the Christian gospel. Today I pick up the [...]
Bill Pratt | July 11, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have just completed reading The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, which has provided me much material for the blog in recent days. In one powerful section of the book, Keller carefully draws out the distinction between one definition of “religion” and the Christian gospel. First, Keller clarifies what he [...]
Bill Pratt | July 8, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt A couple of years ago, I asked one of my good atheist friends what he thought the biggest problem facing mankind was. His answer: our propensity to form exclusionary groups. He explained that everywhere he looked, people were grouping themselves and casting everyone not in their group as “the enemy.” He [...]
Bill Pratt | July 1, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Vampire novelist Anne Rice announced in 1998 that she was converting to Christianity after having turned her back on it for thirty years as an atheist. She then announced in 2010 that she was leaving organized religion, but still believed wholeheartedly in Jesus Christ. In essence, Rice struggled with some of [...]
Bill Pratt | June 27, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Trick question! There isn’t one, despite what some people will tell you. You see, the issue of exactly how God brought forth life on earth is just not something that is part of the essential teachings of Christianity. What are the essential teachings of Christianity? Those doctrines that were elucidated by [...]
Bill Pratt | June 20, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt There are fewer words that are more loaded with a negative connotation than fundamentalism. Generally when we hear that word, we have been trained by the media to react with either fear or disdain, or both. After all, fundamentalists are supposed to be ignorant and violent. To be a fundamentalist used [...]
Bill Pratt | June 17, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt A couple months ago I attended a debate between a Christian scholar and an atheist scholar at a local university. At the conclusion of the debate there was a Q and A session and one of the atheist students stood up and asked something like the following to the Christian scholar: [...]
