America’s evangelical Christians are facing a critical testing-time as the twentieth century draws to a close. Among the most important of the tests we now face is the future of missions, and our faithfulness to the Great Commission.

The issue of Mary remains one of the hottest debates on the Protestant/Roman Catholic divide, and new proposals for Marian doctrines are likely to ignite a theological conflagration. At stake is not only the biblical understanding of Mary, but the integrity of the work of Christ.

by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. and Daniel L. Akin

“The greatest question of our time,” offered historian Will Durant, “is not communism versus individualism, not Europe versus America, not even East versus the West; it is whether men can live without God.” That question, it now appears, will be answered in our own time.

Given the current controversy between the Southern Baptists and the American Jewish community, you might think that Baptists had proposed to force their way into synagogues during the High Holy Days. Major Jewish organizations and liberal Christian groups have accused the Baptists of “spiritual intolerance” and “theological genocide.” What is this all about?

A Response to When We Talk About God. . . Let’s Be Honest
by R. Kirby Godsey

“I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.” That blunt assessment comes from John Dominic Crossan, a leading figure in the Jesus Seminar, and one of the most influential authors on religion in post-Christian America. Thomas Sheehan, another fellow of the Seminar, put it even more directly: “Jesus, regardless of where his corpse ended up, is dead and remains dead.”

“It takes one to know one,” quipped historian Eugene Genovese, then an atheist and Marxist. He was referring to liberal Protestant theologians, whom he believed to be closet atheists. As Genovese observed, “When I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of fellow nonbelievers.”

With thoughts focused on the hereafter, Pope John Paul II expounded on heaven, hell and purgatory in his recent weekly audiences. The pope’s messages reached the headlines of major newspapers as he denied heaven and hell were physical places and seemed to reverse nearly 2,000 years of Christian teaching.

“The sense of an ending is not a fact of nature,” observed Frank Kermode, it is a feature of human consciousness.1 We ascribe meaning to the turn of a new century, and feel a sense ending as the twentieth century comes to a close. If a sense of ending is not a fact of nature, it is certainly a fact of our experience.