This week, The Chimes (the Biola newspaper) published this article, "101 Things to Do Before You Graduate from Biola" and I've seen many people on Facebook commenting on how many they've accomplished. As “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” below is the Torrey version of that list. Some of the below are my contributions; but most of them are from current student...
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What if you could survey the entire scope of Christian doctrine at once: a brief enough summary to show the whole thing at a glance, but with enough detail to see the various parts and how they relate to each other?
As a stand-alone experience, that wouldn't be especially valuable: it would be too much information, too fast, without enough emotional and experiential time f...
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Once I had a membership card in the Moral Majority and my wife listens to Dr. James Dobson.
We work at Biola University, a flagship university for conservative Christians in the United States.
Recent media reports about our fear of the Tea Parties certainly describe our feelings . . . though they underplay the terror and loathing that fills our souls as we think about the...
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There are shows that died before their time, such as Firefly. There were certainly shows that suffered from a lack of love and budget cuts, see the third season of Star Trek: The Only Non-Derivative Version.
One television favorite of the return-to-nature wing of homeschooling is Little House on the Prairie and I would nominate it for the show that most actively destroyed i...
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Philippians is among the sweetest books of the New Testament. It is a short letter from Paul to a congregation that he obviously feels and expresses great affection toward. In 1898, JB Lightfoot, the Bishop of Durham, said that Philippians is “not only the noblest reflexion of St. Paul’s personal character and spiritual illumination, his large sympathies, his womanly tender...
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Featured Essay
There is a lot of material to cover in the doctrine of Scripture: everything from its deep background in God's will to redeem us and reveal himself, to the "business end" of the doctrine in providing a user's guide to the English Bible an ordinary believer holds in his or her hand. In between are topics like inspiration, canonization, inerrancy, and authority. How should all o...
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Today (March 6) is the birthday of A. T. Pierson (1837-1911), one of the most influential figures in the history of conservative Protestantism. An American evangelical, Pierson had an extensive teaching ministry throughout the English-speaking world; the most famous post he held was that he took over the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle as C.H. Spurgeon's health failed, a...
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Spoiler alert: I will be talking about plot in this review, so don’t read it if you haven’t seen the movie, or unless you don’t plan on seeing it anyway!
Most people who hear the name Oxford immediately think about J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) or C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), but they often forget that the “City of Dreaming Spires” is just as much the ...
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It is bad enough if bad information costs you the value of your 401-K, but worse if it costs your soul. Being told you are wrong is important at any time, but hearing that you might be wrong about critical areas is vital.
Who wants to be wrong about the big questions of life?
No friend would see such a major mistake being made without expressing his opinion. This is espec...
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There is an ancient Chinese proverb: “Women hold up half the sky.” Tonight (March 4), a special one-night movie event took place in cinemas across the United States. It was a film based on the international best-selling book Half the Sky by New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn, a former Times correspondent (the couple won the Pulit...
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I'm not sure what came over John Wesley, but one day he got positively excited about the idea of showing the organic, systematic structure of Christian faith. This kind of passion for understanding structural relationships was not his normal way of working: he was a preacher and a world-changer, not a theological ponderer or chart-maker. But on at least one occasion, he took up...
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Featured Essay
The word “apology,” in theological circles, often means a defense of one’s faith. In more common parlance, the word “apology” means admitting a wrong and asking for forgiveness. I actually want to do the latter.
Earlier this week, I led a couple of class sessions on Paul’s epistle to the Romans. We mostly focused on chapters 9-11, as they are some of the tou...
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