My purpose, in my several blogs on Joel Osteen, that were written over the past eleven days, was not to argue about Lutheran-Reformed hermeneutical frameworks. Nor was my purpose to deny the obvious point one reader made, namely that all of us use frameworks and thus hermeneutics is an extremely vital matter for reading and hearing the Bible correctly. That is precisely the point I tried to make, if I understand what I wrote.

What I am attempting to do is to get people who use a particular system to not do so with such confidence. I am hopeful that some will seriously reflect upon where they come from historically on these issues. If this small step is taken we can have an honest discussion and even profitable disagreement.

Let me suggest for those who have any interest in the point I have tried to make about certainty that they read Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, & Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Eerdmans, 1995), by the late Reformed missional-theologian Lesslie Newbigin. If you want to understand what I mean about Horton’s sense of certainty, and why I believe […]

Deciding on how to define evangelicalism, or how to meaningfully express that one is an evangelical, is notoriously difficult. Mark Noll has written about the scandal of losing the evangelical mind while other writers, myself included, have warned that the word refers more often than not to a subculture, not a doctrinally based movement of churches. It seems people have as many different definitions of "evangelical" as there are schools, groups and movements. One soon begins to doubt the value of retaining the term. I have chosen, to this point, to keep it. I have no real quarrel with those who decide otherwise.

My reasons for keeping the word evangelical may eventually be outweighed by the political and social baggage attached to it but currently these positive reasons include the following:

1. The word has its roots in the New Testament word evangel, thus reminding us that we are gospel Christians.

2. The word has solid historic roots in the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent evangelical awakenings.

3. The word avoids denominational labels and identities that make our boundaries of cooperation and fellowship too narrow.

4. The […]

My blog on Joel Osteen’s very popular ministry, posted on May 9, elicited a considerable response. I am told that this is the goal of every blogger. Upon further reflection I write to respond to several of the comments posted throughout this week. These are general comments, not specific to any single writer who posted their thoughts.

1. Most of those who responded understood quite clearly what I wrote and why I wrote it. Some comments left me wondering what certain readers actually understood by my words.

2. I was most definitely not attacking the character, or intellectual honesty and credibility, of Dr. Michael Horton, whom I know and love personally.

3. I did question Dr. Horton’s use of a hermeneutical system that is plainly situated in a very self-consciously Lutheran-Reformed paradigm. By this I mean that his strong law-gospel antithesis rigorously governs how he sees faithfulness to the gospel. This he admits in his more academic writing. All I was saying was this principle impacts how he judges public ministries.

4. This paradigm actually led Dr. Horton to suggest that Joel Osteen was not worshiping […]