Mike Wittmer

What I think. What I know. What I think I know.

  • an interesting analogy

    Julie and I have spent the last four days in South Florida, speaking on Christian worldview at a women’s retreat (thanks, Tullian!), collecting sea shells on Sanibal Island, and watching drunk old people dance in the streets of Naples (are you sure this is the greatest generation?).  The weird part is that I haven’t missed any of…

  • my centered-bounded set

    I ran into it again last week, and I’m hearing it often enough now that I think it deserves a response.  Many leaders are claiming that we who believe in the importance of the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, and the need to believe in Jesus are suffering from bounded set thinking.  Our problem…

  • Machen on faith and knowledge

    This morning I was reading J. Gresham Machen’s book, What Is Faith? (1925), and I found his remarks on our need to know in order to believe especially relevant to a recurring discussion on this blog.  The fact that Machen’s old words could be addressed to any number of emergent leaders reminds me that our…

  • unfashionable is in

    Given the cover story of last week’s Newsweek, “The Decline and Fall of Christian America,” we Americans who believe in Jesus can expect to fall increasingly out of step with our culture.  Life was somewhat different in the 1950’s, when “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance and “in God we trust” was…

  • DeYoung does something

    I am a big fan of Kevin DeYoung and his book, Why We’re Not Emergent, but I was initially disappointed when I received his new book on the will of God, Just Do Something.  It just seemed so small.  But then I read it, and I realized that Kevin and the folks at Moody knew…

  • how the resurrection justifies us

    Thank you all for your insights on how we are justified by Jesus’ resurrection.  I don’t have much to add, except to point to I. Howard Marshall’s fine chapter on this topic in his recent book, Aspects of the Atonement (Milton Keynes, UK:  Paternoster Press, 2007).   Marshall observes that the average Christian tends to…

  • another Easter thought

    This came up yesterday in class:  Romans 4:25 says that Jesus was “raised for our justification” and 1 Corinthians 15:17 says that if Jesus is not raised then we are still in our sins.  Paul seems to have more in mind here than the resurrection merely provides proof that Jesus is God or that his…

  • a thought for Sunday

    I just finished this RBC devotional last week, and though it isn’t quite ready for prime time, I thought that its content might provoke some thoughts in a sermon this Sunday, or at least give you something to preach against.  Easter is the one Sunday I have never been able to preach, as most pastors don’t…

  • everything is dummer in michigan

    Yes, I misspelled that on purpose.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably live near me. Today’s Grand Rapids Press contained an article on the difficulty of walleye to thrive in the Muskegon River.  I’m sure there is more to it than this, but the article describes how every spring the Michigan…

  • Bavinck on the exclusivity of grace

    Herman Bavinck includes this important footnote in his Reformed Dogmatics, 3:491-92.  It comes from Max Müller in a speech he gave at the turn of the twentieth century.  “I may say that for 40 years, as at the University of Oxford I carried out my duties as professor of Sanskrit, I devoted as much time…