Terry Pruitt's Blog

Wasn't the New Testament written hundreds of years after Christ? My Answer: None of the New Testament books have a date of publication written on them. It probably will not surprise anyone that those who attempt to figure out from linguistic and historical evidence the date a certain book of the New Testament was written come out with very different answers. The assumptions one brings to the evidence guides that interpretation. For instance D.A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo and Leon Morris in their book "An Introduction to the New Testament" would date Galatians as being written A.D. 48. They would date the Book of Revelation as having been written A.D. 68-69. These two book are sometimes, not always, considered the first book and the last book written in the New Testament. I have taken Bible classes at both theologically conservative and theologically liberal schools. The more liberal schools would count those dates I just gave as hogwash. I think the more liberal scholars...

I would like to direct your attention to an article by Reclaiming the Mind Ministries. Basically the post is about the differences between fundamentalists, evangelicals, emerging, and emergent. The charts are instructive but I will let you go to the posting Comparing Fundamentalist, Evangelicals and Emergers to see the charts. The basic idea is two fold, what can you know and what is essential. As a side note, I'm with Patton that I'm not ready to disassociate myself with the term evangelical. For that matter, I'm not ready to disassociate myself from the term fundamentalist. Even though evangelical or emerging would better describe my position.

I wrote a paper about the Emerging Church for seminary several years ago. At the time, Emergent and Emerging were not used in the same distinction as they are now. I see them as different forms of the same root, but usage dictates meaning, not history or assignment of meaning. There is an excellent article about the Emergent and Emerging church at the blog Reclaiming the Mind Ministries called Would The Real Emerger Please Stand Up . It is not clear to me where the chart came from but I find it helpful. I'm including these charts from the post here. This first chart shows the range of beliefs in Christianity. I would guess that the author would not be attempting to show that each grouping is as large or historically important as the next one, just the spectrum of belief conveniently boiled down to nice categories. Then he zooms into a section to further discuss the messiness of it all. I'm not quite sure everyone would like their assigned categories, but of course that i...

Below are some of my thoughts on " The Problem with Christian Pop Music ". I’m trying to figure out what pop music is. There was a time I knew exactly what it was. It was what was played on American Top 40 with “Casey” Kasem. Now it is so mixed and varied, that it is difficult to know what a kid who is 18 with an iPod will be listening to. My daughters are as tuned into the Beatles as they are any contemporary artist. (I’m not sure if U2 qualifies as a contemporary artist by the way. I think he hits my generation a little harder than the teens of the new millennium.) Alicia Keys sings some great music, but is she pop? My daughters having me buying the songs for them but I think the genre is R&B and/or Soul. If you asked them if it was R&B, they might know, but they don’t care. They just know what they like. My point is that we are actually at a point in the music business that things are changing rapidly. It is an opportunity for Christians to have an influence inste...