Is it God’s Will to Heal Everyone? A Problem with the Question

This question, common as it is, has a serious problem.

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Why You Shouldn’t Sing Most Worship Songs

“We have more songs at our disposal than at any other point in worship history. That means we need to say ‘no’ to most of them.” –  Scott Connell[1]

Ours is an era of ubiquity in Christian worship music. CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) boasts of having “more than 300,000 songs of worship.” Given the fact that many evangelical churches sing somewhere between 3 and 8 songs each Lord’s Day, between 156 and 416 a year if they don’t repeat any – how are the they to choose which songs to sing? How are they to choose which artists to sing from? Should they sing what the church has always sung? Should they sing what is popular on Christian radio? I have already written briefly on criteria for selecting songs for corporate worship. In this short article I would like to justify being selective in what songs we sing from certain artists. In other words, I want to justify not singing the majority of what any given Christian artist produces, indeed the majority of all worship songs. I shall attempt to show why I think this by using two lines of argumentation, one Biblical the other historical.

Harmony in Cacophony: How to Select Biblical Songs for Corporate Worship

Ours is an age of unparalleled excess in the realm of worship music. Just 60 years ago, many churches only had one hymnal from which to select their hymns for the Sunday morning service. Now, in the digital age, churches have access CCLI, which boasts of having over 300,000 worship songs from which they can select. If those tasked with selecting from ~500 hymns thought that was tiresome enough, I feel sorry for those tasked with choosing from over 300,000 songs! Yet choices must be made, for no church can sing every song. What then are the criteria for selecting songs to include in Sunday worship? Good criteria can dramatically reduce the number of songs to select from and help place the one selecting them on a firm foundation as he prepares to lead God’s people in singing His praises.

77 Questions to ask about Technology

Technology is a tool and as with any other tool the saying is true, “We make our tools and our tools make us.” Man makes hammers and hammers make callouses on man’s hand. Use a hammer too much and you’ll have blisters instead. We use our brains to create digital media and digital media shapes how our brains think.

French philosopher Jacques Ellul recognized the powerful effect of technology on the individual and the community and proposed 77 questions we should ask before adopting any given technology into our lives. If we were to answer these questions before accepting the use of a given technology into our lives…well it might have the potential to change our lives. At the very least we would be conscious of what kind of live we are choosing to live. As Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

2 Hermeneutical Errors of the Prosperity Gospel

The prosperity “gospel” is perhaps the largest heresy of the church today. It is ubiquitous in, and growing on, every continent. There has been much written about the errors of the prosperity “gospel”, for they are legion. A whole volume could be filled with examples of how they rip Scripture out of context, downplay the promise of suffering in the New Testament, absolutize one Scripture at the expense of others, read physical prosperity into texts where it has no place, elevate the gift above the giver, distort the warnings about wealth etc. However, beneath all this there are two fundamental hermeneutical problems that I have encountered again and again in its adherents. They are a backwards reading of redemptive history and an over-realized eschatology.

When did the New Testament become Canon?

Last week I wrote an article on pseudepigraphy in the New Testament canon. This article is the companion piece to that and is written by Gregory Dean Kabakjian. Greg has a B.A. in Biblical Studies from Messiah College and is pursuing a MAR from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

What’s Wrong with the Problem of Evil?

In his essay, “Evil and Omnipotence,” atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie argues that the Christian belief in a wholly good, omnipotent God is incompatible with the existence of evil. Mackie’s argument takes the following form:

P1:  God is wholly good.

P2: God is omnipotent.

P3: Evil exists.

P4: Good is opposed to evil in such a way that it always eliminates it as far as it can.

P5: There are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do.

C: The existence of a being who is both good and omnipotent and the existence of evil are incompatible.