Free Republic

Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Harvard, 2013) is an impressively learned and important book. Still a youngish man (which means younger than me), Harper is already a professor of classics and letters and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. As an expert in the history of the late Roman world, Harper explores in this volume how the Christian sexual ethic, so despised and seemingly inconsequential in the first century, came to be codified in law by the sixth century. Harper does not take sides in this...

Full Title: Not That Kind of Homosexuality? Despite revisionist attempts, the Bible has nothing good to say about homosexual practice. ___________________________________________________________________________ The Bible has nothing good to say about homosexual practice. That may sound like a harsh conclusion, but it’s not all that controversial. Even the gay Dutch scholar Pim Pronk has concluded that “wherever homosexual intercourse is mentioned in Scripture, it is condemned. With reference to it the New Testament adds no new arguments to those of the Old. Rejection is a foregone conclusion; the assessment of it nowhere constitutes a problem.”[1] There is simply no positive case to...

Five Questions for Christians Who Believe the Bible Supports "Gay Marriage" How have all Christians at all times and in all places interpreted the Bible so wrongly for so long? As far as you are concerned, you haven’t rejected your evangelical faith. You haven’t turned your back on God. You haven’t become a moral relativist. You’ve never suggested anything goes when it comes to sexual behavior. In most things, you tend to be quite conservative. You affirm the family, and you believe in the permanence of marriage. But now you’ve simply come to the conclusion that two men or two...

On April 27, 2014, University Reformed Church (URC) voted 282-9 in favor of leaving the Reformed Church in America (RCA) and affiliating with the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). The following Wednesday, the consistory of URC voted unanimously (14-0) to file a petition with the Classis of South Grand Rapids that we might leave the RCA with all our real and personal property and join the Presbytery of the Great Lakes in the PCA.For the past three years, our church has wrestled with our place in the Reformed Church in America. We have prayed, studied, strategized, spoke, listened, prayed, asked...

If all Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16), then there is a unity to be found across the pages of the Bible. Without minimizing the differences of genre and human authorship, we should nevertheless approach the Bible expecting theological distinctives and apparent discrepancies to be fully reconcilable. The unity of Scripture also means we should be rid of, once and for all, this nonsense about being red letter Christians, as if the words of Jesus are the really important verses in Scripture and carry more authority and are somehow more directly divine than other verses. An evangelical...

He died because he acted like the incarnate Son of God; spoke like the incarnate Son of God What infuriated the establishment most were the claims to Lordship, the posture of authority, the exalted titles, the exercise of Messiahship, the presumed right to forgive, the way in which Jesus put himself in the center of Israel’s story, the delusions of grandeur, the acceptance of worship, and the audacity of man being God. Jesus did not die because the Jerusalem nasties couldn’t stand a souped up incarnation of Sesame Street.