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The Good Book Blog, a resource from the faculty of Talbot School of Theology, features articles that explore contemporary ideas from the perspective of the Bible — the “Good Book” — including topics such as apologetics, biblical studies, theology, philosophy, spiritual formation, ministry and leadership. Find out more about what sets Talbot apart and how it prepares Christian leaders through its degree programs.

 

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  • William Lane Craig — 

    Dr. Craig, I am a longtime admirer of your work. Although I am no longer a Christian, your work as a philosopher and theologian has played a significant role in the formation of my own views and I am fully persuaded of theism, although I still have lots of questions about it. I think your analysis of God's relationship to time is plausible, but I always get stuck on the idea that God is timeless apart from creation, but temporal since creation ...

  • Gary Manning Jr — 

    The release of the movie Left Behind has again drawn attention to the Christian belief in the rapture. The movie tries to portray the chaos in the world as millions of Christians suddenly disappear. This image has interested Christians for quite a while. I recall watching the Thief in the Night series of movies back in the 1970s (the Antichrist had sideburns!). But I am interested in a question that is often overlooked: what is the point of the rapture in the Bible?

  • Octavio Esqueda — 

    Recuerdo que mi padre solía decir con frecuencia “cada cabeza es un mundo” cuando se refería a las diferentes maneras de pensar y actuar entre las personas. Por esta razón, la comunicación es parte básica de las relaciones humanas. No se puede establecer ninguna relación importante y duradera sin que exista una comunicación fluida en la que se intercambien ideas y opiniones. La diversidad de percepciones nos abre la puerta a las relaciones saludables a través de la comunicación, pero al mismo tiempo crea la posibilidad de conflicto. Así que, es importante que todos en general, pero esencial para los líderes, que aprendamos a disentir sin ofender.

  • Kenneth Berding — 

    Are you as concerned about the growing problem of biblical illiteracy as I am? We Christians have more Bible-focused resources available to us than has any generation of Christians in the history of the world. Despite this we are literally—from a spiritual standpoint—starving ourselves to death. Would you like your church, adult Bible class, youth group, or small group to reach Bible fluency by pursuing an Old Testament Fluency in 12 Weeks class or a New Testament Fluency in 12 Weeks class using the free resources at biblefluency.com? Here’s how.

  • William Lane Craig — 

    Dr Craig, I'm growing more skeptical about Christianity and was wondering if you could answer a question about the gospel. When Jesus was on the cross He either paid for all sin or some sin. To pay for some sin would mean limited atonement which is not what scripture teaches. But if Jesus paid for all sin then why are some people who are in Hell paying for their sin? ...

  • Octavio Esqueda — 

    La carta del apóstol Pablo a los Efesios representa uno de los documentos doctrinales más importantes del cristianismo. En los primeros tres capítulos Pablo explica lo maravilloso del amor y la gracia divina que nos dio vida a través de Jesucristo cuando todos estábamos muertos en nuestros pecados. En Jesús también, el Dios de toda gracia nos ha bendecido con toda bendición espiritual. Los cristianos somos adoptados en la familia de Dios, encontramos aceptación, redención, perdón, sabiduría, una herencia eterna que está garantizada por el Espíritu Santo.

  • Kenneth Berding — 

    What does it take to achieve Bible Fluency? In my next two posts I will guide you through how to use a brand new free resource called Bible Fluency: Sing it, See it, Study it, found at biblefluency.com. This first post seeks to answer the question: How can I use music, visuals, and a workbook to help me learn to think my way through the Bible?

  • Alan Hultberg — 

    I recently previewed the upcoming Nicholas Cage film, Left Behind, based on the books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The film centers on the chaos that ensues after the instantaneous disappearance of millions of people worldwide due to the coming of Christ for his church, an event known as “the rapture.”

  • William Lane Craig — 

    Q: I listened to your debate with Sean Carroll, read your post-debate threads, interacted with Aron Wall and Luke Barnes, and have determined that you haven't yet responded to Carroll's Quantum Eternity point against premise 2 of the kalam, "under conventional quantum mechanics, any universe with a non-zero energy and a time-independent Hamiltonian will necessarily last forever toward both the past and the future." Aron Wall confirmed that this point is independent of one's stance towards an A or B theory of time. Wall mentions on his blog that one could try to argue that the total energy of the universe is zero, but Barnes and others don't think this is the case. Do you have any response yet to Carroll on this? Even better would be a response that presupposes that the net energy of the universe is non-zero.

  • William Lane Craig — 

    "First, even though I am an atheist, I have learned a lot from you by reading your responses in Q&A and watching your debates. Even though you sometimes make my blood boil with your views, there are several areas of agreement. One of these is your nominalist (or anti-realist) position concerning abstract objects, which you recently discussed in your Q & A on God and Infinity. My question, however, concerns the implications of your nominalist view, which I think leaves you in an uncomfortable position regarding your ontology of beauty and possibly your moral ontology ..."

  • William Lane Craig — 

    Dear Dr Craig, You may be aware that Frank Turek has a question he will sometimes ask atheists, "if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian"? Well, recently, an atheist flipped this question around and asked me "If the Islamic State were true (by which he means, if the specific type of Allah that IS believe in, existed) then likewise, would you become an IS member?" ...

  • Charlie Trimm — 

    Half of my teaching load each semester consists of teaching the required freshman class Biblical Interpretation and Spiritual Formation. Although I thought the combination of these two topics in one class was strange when I first read the job posting, the class has grown on me and I now love teaching it. I see the connection as leading from proper reading of the Bible to spiritual formation: the very structure of the class helps prevent us from merely reading the Bible in an academic fashion. We spend a large part of the semester looking at the different genres of the Bible (law, prophecy, etc.) and then we reflect on spiritual formation topics related to those genres (such as legalism and idolatry).

  • William Lane Craig — 

    Hi Sir, I am very glad to meet you through online... I understood the essentiality of trinity, there is no doubt about why I should believe in triune God. But, I have been thinking what could be the reason for son and father relationship in God’s head ...

  • Dave Keehn — 

    A family had a priceless family heirloom – a vase – that was passed down one generation to the next generation. One day, the parents of the family who had possession of the vase, left the teenagers at home while they went out shopping for the day. When they returned home, their children met the parents at the door, with sad faces, reporting: “Mother, Father… you know that priceless heirloom our family passes down one generation to the next… while our generation just dropped it”

  • William Lane Craig — 

    "... I have a question about morality that you'll hopefully be able to answer and clarify your position on. My knowledge of meta-ethics is pretty modest, but I'm actually leaning albeit tentatively towards morality being objective (see, there's at least one thing we agree on!). I'd argue that moral obligation can be objective without God (I won't do that here though), but I'd go even further and say that IF morality is founded in God it is NOT objective. If "objective" means "mind-independent" which might be a rough definition of objective, but let's accept it for now doesn't that make morality founded in God "divinely subjective" rather than objective? ..."

  • Joe Hellerman — 

    I recently read a fascinating book by Richard Nisbett, who compares and contrasts contemporary Asian and Western worldviews. It just so happens that the strong-group mentality of Nisbett’s Asian culture corresponds in some important ways to the mindset of people in the New Testament world.

  • William Lane Craig — 

    Dear Dr. Craig, In his debate with you and, on pp. 175 & 211 in his book "Jesus is Dead," Dr. Robert Price argues that the notion of resurrections are likely not all that unexpected in 2nd Temple Judaism and/or totally absent from the 1st century Jewish world view. He specifically cites the case of some wondering if Jesus is the resurrected John the Baptist. Beyond your answer that points out Price's essential category error (resurrected mere men are not the same thing as the expectation of a resurrected Messiah), could you please elaborate further as to why the two instances (Jesus mistaken as John resurrected and Jewish allowances for a dying & resurrected God) are wholly distinct?

  • Charlie Trimm — 

    My previous posts have looked at several examples of the different ways God interacted with non-Israelite nations. Ken Berding suggested that I compile a list of the non-Israelite followers of YHWH in the Old Testament. Without further ado, here they are.

  • David Horner — 

    How could it be reasonable to base my life on an ancient book (the Bible was written between 2000 and 3500 years ago)? Indeed, how could it be reasonable to base my life on any book? I should think for myself. To live by someone else’s instructions is to surrender my own mind and personality. That approach produces mindless drones, cultists and terrorists. Yet for two millennia, followers of Jesus from every culture and language have followed the Bible as their authority, from simple folks to some of history’s most influential scholars and intellectuals, from poor people with no political power to those in positions of great influence. And the world is radically different as a result.

  • William Lane Craig — 

    Dr. Craig, You have played a vital role in my apologetic development, a long with other philosophers. I am puzzled by the fact that a lot of things are taken for granted although examining their legitimacy is the job of philosophy, thus I need to ask you, why do you believe in time in the first place? Isn't just an idea in our mind that helps us locate an event in relation to our experience? I do not get older because of time, but because of my biological development and entropic reality. These are physical constituents of the Universe that entail space and mass in a dynamical interaction. Moreover, the elements that shape events already exist in our universe, to say the time for x has not yet come, is strictly to say that the physical conditions for x to occur is not satisfied yet by the gathered factors. Can you help me identify what I could be missing here, please?

  • Joy Mosbarger — 

    Have you ever felt like a failure? Inadequate? Ineffectual? Have you ever examined your heart and glimpsed sin and darkness and defeat? I have. It is discouraging and demoralizing. It makes me wonder what God sees in me. There is no doubt that I am a flawed vessel. But does that mean that I am a useless vessel?

  • Mitch Glaser — 

    Perhaps the real question our friends are asking is this: “What impact does our faith as Messianic Jews have on our support of Israel?” This is a fair question, and it is a reasonable assumption that most Jews who believe in Jesus support the Jewish state.

  • William Lane Craig — 

    Dear Dr. Craig, I have been arguing with a friend that is an atheist. I am also an atheist or perhaps more correctly, an agnostic about Leibniz’s cosmological argument ... If after sufficient research, Leibniz’s argument proves more plausibly true than false, than on the basis of it and the abductive argument for the historicity of Christ's resurrection, I'm prepared to take Pascal's Wager.

  • William Lane Craig — 

    ... I have read and listened to you on your reformed epistemologist view; the Christian faith being based on Holy Spirit witnessed properly basic beliefs; distinguishing between knowing and showing your Faith to be true and all. In your statements, and especially with reference to the recent 'Problem with Christian Apologetics' podcast, you state that when a believer encounters a more skilled and sophisticated rebuttal of his Faith, because he knows his Faith to be true primarily by the Witness of the God, he only has to go and research on good defeaters to the rebuttals. The unanswered rebuttals in no way should trump the witness of the Spirit to us on the Truth of Christianity. My question is, wouldn't that be argued to be having the end game in mind and only finding the reasons to shore up a presupposed conclusion? Wouldn't the incentive to beef up your case lead to interpreting the data to fit the conclusion already at hand? I believe you hold that we should move towards where the evidences lead us, how open are we to the evidences if we have a conclusion that has got to and can only be upheld? I would love to have a response from you.

  • Ron Pierce — 

    Just this month, after leading a two-week study tour with the Whittier Area Community Church, our group returned home on June 8, 2014. Most of us met a barrage of questions about “What’s really going on over there? Resulting conversations intensified when the latest surge of “Israel vs. Hamas” fighting erupted in the Gaza Strip about three weeks later ...