Are spiritual gifts available today or did they cease after the original apostles died?  In this interview, I talk to Dr. Sam Storms about his own personal experience with speaking in tongues, his biblical case for why gifts are available today, and how he makes room for them in his church services.  Before delving in, I want to just clarify some quick vocabulary.  You are going to hear two terms a lot, and I want to be sure you know what they mean.  The first is cessationist.  This is someone who believes spiritual gifts ceased with the death of the apostles.  The other term is continuationist, which is someone who believes these manifestations continue right down to our own day.

Dr. Sam Storms has a Ph. D. from the University of Texas and has pastored for about forty-five years in Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.  He taught at Wheaton College for four years and now serves as the lead pastor of Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  He’s the founder of Enjoying God Ministries and serves on the boards of Desiring God Ministries, Bethlehem College and Seminary, and Acts 29 Network.  He’s the author of numerous published books and articles (see below).  He describes himself as “an Amillennial, Calvinistic, charismatic, credo-baptistic, complementarian, Christian Hedonist who loves his wife of 47 years, his two daughters, his four grandchildren, books, baseball, movies, and all things Oklahoma University.”

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Today, we are publicly announcing the launch of a new para-church organization called the UCA or the Unitarian Christian Alliance.  This is a new ministry that I’ve been working on with Dale Tuggy, Kegan Chandler, and Mark Cain for months and I believe it will help all of us, but especially those who don’t live near a church that allows for biblical unitarian members.  Currently the UCA is a website and a conference, though we are hoping it will grow to be much more.  The site is unitarianchristianalliance.org and it’s where you can register to be found by others looking for fellowship with one-God believers.  The conference is slated for the Fall of 2020 in the Nashville, TN area.  I’ll get you more details about that once we settle on a venue and a date.

I hope that if you are a unitarian Christian–someone who believes the Father of Jesus is the only true God–you’ll sign up.  It’s free and raising your hand to be counted will help others find you so that our scattered movement can coalesce into more home fellowships as well as brick-and-mortar churches.

This is part 6 of our Foreknowledge and Free Will series.  Last time Dr. Sean Cole introduced the Calvinist understanding of God’s foreknowledge and the limitations on our freedom as a result of our fallen nature.  This time I ask Cole about unconditional election and how that compares to a lottery.  After all, if God has no conditions by which he decides whom he elects to salvation, then isn’t randomness all we have left?  Also, I ask Cole to respond to a number of texts including John 3.16, 1 Timothy 2.4, 2 Peter 3.9, and Luke 7.30.

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This is part 5 of our Foreknowledge and Free Will series.  We’ve considered Open Theism and Arminianism and now we are going to begin thinking about Calvinism. This way of conceiving of God’s foreknowledge argues for both exhaustive foreknowledge and meticulous providence. Thus, no one comes to Christ apart from God’s predestination since our natures are so corrupted that we do not have the ability to choose God.

I’m happy to have Dr. Sean Cole as my guest today.  He is the lead pastor at Emanuel Baptist Church in Sterling, Colorado.  He is the host of a podcast called “Understanding Christianity” and he teaches Old Testament and New Testament theology as well as biblical interpretation as an adjunct instructor at Colorado Christian University.  He has a Doctor of Ministry degree in expository preaching from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  He is the author of Your Identity in the Trinity: Discovering God’s Grace in the Gospel, which came out last April.

In this episode I ask Cole to share about his background and lay out a positive case for his view of foreknowledge and free will.

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This is part 4 of our Foreknowledge and Free Will series.  Last time Dr. Leighton Flowers of the Soteriology101 podcast laid out his commitment to both God’s complete knowledge of all future events as well as humanity’s ability to freely choose.  Rather than explaining philosophically how that is possible, he suggested that we do not need to know “how” God does something in order to believe “that” he does it.

In this episode, I ask him about one more Calvinistic text, Romans 9, before delving into a number of Open Theism texts to get his exegesis of these interesting passages, including Genesis 6.5; Isaiah 5.3-7; Jeremiah 7.31; and Psalm 106.23.

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We are now in part 3 of our Foreknowledge and Free Will series.  We’ve considered Open Theism–the idea that God’s foreknowledge is limited to what he plans to do as well as what he can ascertain from past and present conditions.  In a couple of weeks we’ll examine Calvinism, which holds that God not only foreknows but also predestines all who will be saved.  But, for today, our focus is on the Arminian position.

Today, I’m happy to have Dr. Leighton Flowers the host of the Soteriology101 a podcast that puts forward an Arminian understanding of salvation as well as responds to prominent Calvinist thinkers. Flowers is also the Director of Evangelism and Apologetics for Texas Baptists.  He has authored two books, including The Potter’s Promise, which rebuffed the theology found in James White’s The Potters Freedom.  More recently, he came out with God’s Provision for All, which sets out a positive case for provisionalism, an understanding of salvation that teaches everyone is free to choose to believe the gospel.  Flowers earned his PhD from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary where his dissertation focused on the rise of Calvinism in the Southern Baptist Convention.

In this episode, I ask Flowers to share about his background in Calvinism and how he changed his mind about it.  We discuss his middle position that both affirms God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and our free will.  Then we take a look at a couple of texts like Ephesians 1 and Romans 8 to hear his exegesis of them.

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Last week we began our Foreknowledge and Freewill series with Dr. Dale Tuggy who gave us an overview of the various positions.  He also commended Open Theism as a view that triumphs where others suffer from logical contradictions.  Now, today in part two, Tuggy will further explore and defend Open Theism against a number of common critiques including:

Additionally, we delve into how Open Theism deals with prayer, especially in light of Hezekiah’s prayer for healing.

Now, I realize some of you listening are ardent Open Theists and some of you are not.  Keep in mind that next week we are going to hear from Dr. Leighton Flowers on the Ariminian view and then Dr. Sean Cole is going to lay out the case for Calvinist compatabilism.  My goal here is to expose you to multiple views so you can see all of the options laid out side by side.

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Today we are beginning an exciting new series on one of the most interesting ongoing controversies within Christian theology.  Does God have exhaustive foreknowledge of the future?  Does he know everything that is going to happen before it happens?  If so, what does that mean for human free will?  What are the various options within Christian theology and philosophy that well-meaning bible students have taken over the years?

Now, I’ve been working hard on getting competent representatives from various backgrounds so that you can hear the major options to chose from.  As such, I’ve got interviews with an Open Theist, an Arminian, and a Calvinist, resulting in a six-part series on foreknowledge and freewill.

To begin with Dr. Dale Tuggy will give us a lay of the land, going through seven different ways that Christian philosophers have understood divine foreknowledge and human free will.  He makes the case that the notion of exhaustive foreknowledge makes libertarian free will impossible.  After all, if we are unable to do other than what God knows we are going to do, then we don’t really have the freedom to chose, right?  See what you think.

Dr. Dale Tuggy served as Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia for 18 years. He has taught courses in analytic theology, philosophy of religion, religious studies, and the history of philosophy. Tuggy has a PhD from Brown University. He has authored about two dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters relating to the Trinity and other topics in analytic theology and philosophy of religion.

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Options for Foreknowledge and Freewill

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Gratitude is a key to spiritually healthy living.  We have so many reasons to be thankful, but in this message, I’d like to focus on just five:

As God’s people, our lives should not look just the same as the world.  Rather, they should be marked by an enduring sense of gratitude.

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We’ve had quite a number of folks commenting in on episode 299, my interview with Dr. Jerry Wierwille, called “Does the Bible Support Abortion“.  That episode was very limited to focusing on a couple of texts relevant to building a Christian perspective on abortion.  Essentially, we concluded, as on several previous episodes, that abortion-on-demand doesn’t fit with the biblical worldview.  However, this is just one aspect of what the bible teaches about bodies.  In fact there is much more to say on the subject.  So I thought it would be good this week to play out my presentation from a theological conference last year called, “Biblical Somatology.”

My aim for this research project was to mine the scriptures for information on the body, both how we should think about our bodies as well as the boundaries God has placed on what we should and shouldn’t do with our bodies.  Then by contrasting the biblical approach with our own social issues related to bodies and sexuality, we can glimpse just a small bit of how genius God’s boundaries are as well as how they unleash human flourishing.

Now there is also a video version of this talk you can access as well as a much more comprehensive paper with all the references and footnotes in it.  So I encourage you to check those out if you are interested.

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