Our pastor has been preaching on Biblical doctrines of conscience, and he cited a book that I went ahead and bought: Conscience: What is it, how to train it, and loving those who differ, by Andrew David Naselli and J. D. Crowley. I have been reading it. It is a good and short study on the subject, about 140 pages with discussion questions, bibliography, lots of citations, and readable. I recommend it, and I am not a recommender. However, I do have some thoughts. One of the authors is a missionary in Southeast Asia, or has been, and the other is a professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis. That is John Piper's institution. This second author (who gets first bill on the book) also has a Ph.D. from Bob Jones and one from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The Bob Jones background shows. But having been a part of fundamentalism, I feel his pain. It comes out in the examples they use. Some of the examples seem dated, like wearing jeans, others fit m...
I live just south of Tennessee and actually lived in that state for many years. I am happy to live in Georgia now, but what happens in Tennessee sort of affects me because I go to church and visit doctors in the closest big city, Chattanooga. So we have been talking about Christa Pike. A woman in my Life Group class who would probably be a conservative on most issues asked why Christians support capital punishment if it is wrong to murder. We talked about how it is commanded in the Old Testament, in general terms, and the government is not an individual and is not a church. However, I left out the important stuff. Really. I think a lot of us would be pro-capital punishment if it were a flawless procedure. Flawless in terms of the judgment and justice system, as in no wrong convictions. Flawless in terms of not taking decades to execute the convicted person; in other words, relatively swift. Flawless in not taking so much money to house and pay for lawyers for the convi...