The Bible was used to support the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the evils of slavery in the Antebellum South. But does scripture actually support slavery?
Author and apologist Rebecca McLaughlin joins me on today’s episode of What in the Word? to discuss.
Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
God’s Word is meant to be a source of life and healing. But when misused, it can become a weapon to inflict harm. This damage is all the more the case when Scripture is mishandled to justify, excuse, or shield abuse.
When done by spiritual authorities (pastors and churches), such misuse scripture is itself spiritually abusive and thus deeply harmful in its own right. As Steven Tracy helpfully put it,
While any type of abuse can be extremely damaging, we have found that spiritual abuse is often some of the most damaging due to the way it shatters the very resources we need for health and healing.1
In this episode of Logos Live, I sit down with Steven Tracy to talk about how to use Scripture to heal, not harm, especially in instances of abuse.
Check out the full episode and accompanying article.
Luke records that the early church in Jerusalem held everything in common: Believers sold property and land and gave proceeds to the apostles who distributed the funds as any had need (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–37).
So did the early church practice something like communism? Dr. Darrell Bock joins me on today’s episode of What in the Word? to discuss.
Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
What exactly is political theology?
In his article, “A Guide to Political Theology: Its Key Concepts and Perspectives,” Jake Meador quotes me defining political theology as follows:
[Political theology refers to] a discipline of theology dedicated to applying the resources of Christian theology to the interests or questions of politics, i.e., how society is organized.
This includes exploring questions such as the origin, responsibility, and domain of government, the appropriate means of government (e.g., law, lethal coercion), the moral foundations of civil law, the relationship between church institutions and the state, the responsibility of Christians to the state and society, and the material and social implications of the gospel of the kingdom.
The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Machnee’s “Autism & Christianity: A Square Peg in a Round Hole?”
Within many Christian circles, autism in all its forms remains little understood. Autistic ways of thinking and processing are often construed by pastors and clergy as problems to fix, rather than as different ways of understanding. …
Don’t mistake difference for sin. Autistic people will see things differently; they will process information differently; and they will interpret relationships and social dynamics differently.
Christians often interpret these differences as sin, disobedience, defiance, or a lack of spiritual fruit, when in fact they are simply differences in neurodevelopment. While autistic people are undoubtedly imperfect and sin like everyone else, differences that are often benign are treated as matters of spiritual failure. …
Because people are different, the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23) will often express themselves differently in an autistic person than a non-autistic person. What love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control look like in someone without autism will often be quite different from what they look like in an autistic person.
We know that these qualities take different forms across different genders, ages, and cultures. Yet for some reason, we fail to extend that same expectation to differences in neurodevelopment. We unfortunately expect these fruits to appear identical. But fruit looks different when it grows on different trees.1
Kirk E. Miller 