Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:03:52 — 66.8MB)

DESCRIPTION: This is Part B of a 2-part episode. Jack continues the discussion of the “salvation” language in the New Testament, and in this part, gets into the “children of God” and “sons of God” passages, too.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:02 — 69.5MB)

DESCRIPTION: In this 2-part episode, Jack discusses how the New Testament writers and speakers didn’t only speak of salvation in the past tense, as so many of us today do, but also in the ongoing tense, and in the future tense. Taking all their language into account leads to some different conclusions that we might get if we simply focus in on the past tense, as so many seem to do when they say “I was saved when I was 17.” Jack demonstrates that while the NT authors and speakers did use the past tense, they were also quite clearly looking forward to a salvation event.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:52:33 — 115.9MB)

DESCRIPTION: Jack talks about how it’s hard to know a prophecy has been fulfilled when you’re not sure about the details of what was supposed to happen. He also approaches the problems we run into when trying to understand Bible topics in neat, little packages when the fact of the matter is that we are given more information about such things than we can conveniently keep track of.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:54 — 100.6MB)

DESCRIPTION: Jack sums up the Bible as the story of the many who didn’t listen to God, and of the few who did—some even after having started off as non-listeners. This is timely for the Easter week because Jesus was the one who had been telling humans all along what was right and just and true, and he was the one the non-listeners killed in order to silence him.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:32 — 57.7MB)

DESCRIPTION: Jack reads and discusses two related from his blog, concerning how we tend to size things up, both in our own minds, and as we describe them to others. The discussion contains many practical examples from real life, including religion and politics.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:16:30 — 78.3MB)

DESCRIPTION: Some say things like, “The goal of all good Bible study is application….”, but Jack takes a closer look at that idea, and gets into the nitty gritty of how consistently (or inconsistently) we apply (or don’t apply) various Bible verses. So this is a bit of a “get real” episode, in answer to how good we may think we are doing with the whole application business. Jack’s goal is to make you think it through, and to realize that good application is not always as easy as one might think.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:55 — 42.4MB)

DESCRIPTION: Jack reads from a recent blog post about how liars, not being able to twist the reality of things, have to twist themselves in order to pretend that things are different from how they really are. This is an extended discussion that’s highly relevant to the direction this podcast has been headed.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:33 — 14.6MB)

DESCRIPTION: What happens when you omit certain teachings from Christianity? You can end up with a big picture that looks very little like what Jesus taught. In this short episode, Jack reads his recent blog post.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:15:09 — 76.5MB)

DESCRIPTION: Jack reads from and discusses an article about his observations of various cognitive biases that were in play at the time of the controversial Freddie Gray death in 2015. He details a list of 46 biases he observed in various people of different social, racial, and political backgrounds, and then discusses how biases of that type keep us from understanding the Bible correctly.