Thoughts on ethics, society, politics, religion, philosophy, theology, and everything in between
Antisemitism is prejudice against and hatred of Jewish people. One of the most frequently made moral charges made against Christianity is that it is antisemitic. While Christianity teaches that Christians should love all people, many argue that Christianity actually produces hatred against Jews. If true, this would be a major contradiction within Christianity that would … Read more
One of the most common criticisms of biblical ethics antichristians make is that the Bible supports slavery. However, it is a gross misrepresentation of biblical teaching to claim that the Bible “supports” slavery just because there is no explicit condemnation of slavery in the Bible. In this post, I will briefly examine what the Bible … Read more
Biblical Ethics: Violence In the book of Psalms, there are a number of imprecatory psalms, in which the psalmist calls on God to smite his enemies. The most infamous of these is Psalm 137, which ends by saying, “O Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back for what you … Read more
In a previous apologetics series on this blog, In Defense of Christian Ethics, I responded to a number of common objections to the reasonableness of Christian morality. These next few posts will supplement that series, responding to a number of additional objections to the coherence of Christian ethics. Divine Command Theory Critics of Christian morality … Read more
We do not have access to the original compositions of any of the books of the Bible. Instead, we have access to copies of copies of those compositions. Since the printing press did not exist in the ancient world, all those copies had to be painstakingly made by hand. Whenever a text is copied by … Read more
The Torah, Isaiah, and Modern Biblical Scholarship Traditionally, Christians have believed that the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was in its entirety written by Moses. However, in the modern period, critical biblical scholars began to call this belief into question. A number of passages in the Torah contain historical details from after the … Read more
The Bible is not a single book. It is a collection of dozens of books written by many different authors over the course of centuries. Eventually, these books were acknowledged by the Church to be the inspired word of God and were collected into an official “canon” of Scripture, which we today call the Bible. … Read more
The idea that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises to His covenant people Israel is central and foundational to the message of the New Testament. The New Testament is filled with citations and allusions to Old Testament Scriptures, seeking to show that Jesus is the Messiah, the hope of Israel who brings Old Testament … Read more
Skeptics have often argued that the resurrection narratives of the four Gospels are hopelessly contradictory, and that this sheds doubt on the reality of Jesus’s resurrection. Now, it is certainly true that we have four very different resurrection narratives in the Gospels (this provides good evidence that these are independent eyewitness accounts, rather than a … Read more
In the book of Ephesians, Paul quotes Psalm 68:18 as saying, “When He ascended on high, He took captives, and gave gifts to His people” (Eph 4:8). However, the original Hebrew of Psalm 68:18 reads, “You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men.” This seems to … Read more