Randal Rauser | The Tentative Apologist

Randal Rauser is associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, Edmonton, Canada and was granted Taylor's first annual teaching award for Outstanding Service to Students in 2005.

Worldviews: A Conversation with Barry

October 10th, 201111:13 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

I have enjoyed having a convesation with Barry Bowen about the concept of worldview. Unfortunately extended comments in the threads at the Christian Post are very hard to follow since paragraph breaks are not allowed and thus everything gets mashed together. So I have reproduced my response to Barry here: Barry: "if Christian convi...
The problem of irrelevant comments explained

October 09th, 201112:46 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

In my last article, "Commenting on the Tentative Apologist" I explained that I will be deleting two types of comments: those that are ad hominem attacks on my person and those that are non sequiturs. In this article I am going to explain further what a non sequitur is by using a recent example. In my article "Why Christians shouldn't seek a biblic...
Commenting on The Tentative Apologist

October 09th, 201102:42 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

There has been some discussion recently at The Christian Post blogs about the ongoing problem of decorum. A good example of the problem is found in the comments at my blog from individuals who choose not to engage the topics and arguments of my articles but rather to post non sequiturs and ad hominems. For example, in my recent article "Does...
Why Christians shouldn’t seek a “biblical worldview”

October 08th, 201101:43 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

Yesterday morning I set out to deliver two workshop sessions at a Christian conference in another city. It was a round-trip journey that would have taken months by wagon. But such are the wonders of modern technology that I flew out in the morning and arrived home again late last night. Over the years I have spoken at many conferences of this type ...
Does God punish people through natural disasters?

October 05th, 201110:48 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

By some counts more than three hundred thousand people were killed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake while an additional three hundred thousand were injured and one million rendered homeless. The scale of human suffering is truly unimaginable. And then, even as people were still struggling for their next breath while buried in ten tonnes of concrete, a...
Quote others the way you would have them quote you

October 05th, 201109:07 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

Martin Luther is a darling of the internet infidel community not least because he provided many quotable tidbits which can be invoked at will to marginalize Christians as being "irrational" or "anti-reason". Take the case of Jag. In reference to the claim that faith is opposed to reason he noted "Martin Luther would have strenuously agreed." When ...
What was in Jesus’ hand? Lessons on why you can’t take the Bible literally word for word

October 04th, 201112:55 AM ET

By Randal Rauser

According to a 2007 Gallup survey "About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word." Now let's think about this. Would you please open your Bibles to Revelation 1:14-16: *ahem* "His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like...
A jerk before Jesus becomes a jerk for Jesus

October 03rd, 201112:04 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

The story behind "Machine Gun Preacher" is made for Hollywood. The film tells the (true) story of Sam Childers, a biker who becomes a Christian and then is deeply moved when he hears a missionary describe the plight of Sudanese orphans. So moved is he that he leaves his family, flies to Sudan, gets a gun, and begins defending those orphans. There ...
Should you marry your theology to the latest science?

September 30th, 201112:49 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

I've been slowly reading through Michael Shermer's How We Believe in my spare time. It is a pleasant enough read, but has many noticeable weaknesses. Perhaps the biggest weakness is that Shermer is an advocate of the separation or two worlds model of theology and science (what Stephen Jay Gould called the "NOMA" or non-overlapping magisteria approa...
Is the church supposed to be “a place for you”?

September 29th, 201112:09 PM ET

By Randal Rauser

In the late 1970s a young preacher named Rick Warren started going door to door asking people why they didn't attend church. He then took that data and used it as a basis to start his church. And the rest, as they say, is history. I'm sure you could learn a lot of value from an exercise like that. "The greeter didn't look at me when he shook my ha...

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About this blog

An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).