Kevin T. Bauder At the end of 1990 I left the church that I had pastored for six years and moved my family to Dallas so I could pursue doctoral studies. I had no source of income, no friends in Texas, and no family nearby. After a few weeks I found a job in a… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder As I write this essay, the 2020 presidential election is still undecided. After two days of counting, some states are still not certain which candidate won—and until those counts are complete, their votes in the electoral college are hanging in the balance. Neither candidate presently has enough to win the presidency. The… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder The church’s place is not to address political questions. Rather, its work is to proclaim the whole counsel of God. Christian individuals, however, are responsible to act upon moral and spiritual concerns before they address merely temporal ones. Matters of principle should take precedence over matters of preference. Therefore, part of the… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder To everything there is a season . . . a time to die (Eccl 3:1–2). It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder The book of Job includes a conversation, spread over several chapters, about what God needs from humans. Job speaks, then Eliphaz replies. Job speaks again, then Elihu answers. Job never replies to Elihu because God interrupts. God challenges Job with these words at Job 41:11. “Who has given to Me that I… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder One day a deacon from a church in my area phoned me to share his philosophy of creation-and-salvation history. He began his story by claiming that God, having lived forever without companionship, became lonely and needed someone to fellowship with. Thus compelled, God created the world and the first humans. When they… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder All people everywhere want justice. Even a hardcore logical positivist feels a sense of injustice if you step ahead of him after hours of waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The universal yearning for justice has been expressed in documents from the Code of Hammurabi and the book of Job to… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder For me, learning to read was like being initiated into the mysteries of a secret society. The ability to look at marks on a page and to register those marks in my brain as words, sentences, ideas, and stories—well, it seemed magical. It still does. People who did not enjoy reading perplexed… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder Pastors work with people, so they need personal skills. Pastors work with churches as organizations, so they need administrative skills. More than anything else, however, pastors work with ideas. They do the work of the mind. At minimum, they seek to grasp the meaning of God’s Word and to communicate it to… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder The Sixth Commandment forbids murder. This commandment is one of God’s moral laws, grounded in His nature, and articulated across the dispensations. The first murderer, Cain, faced God’s judgment for his crime (Gen 4:8–12). After the Flood, God pronounced capital punishment to be the penalty for murder (Gen 9:5–6). Jesus expounded the… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder (With apologies to Wilbur Smith, who has already used this title, and to Murray Harris, who borrowed it from him before I could) I won’t sugar coat the news: I just turned sixty-five. I can remember when my mother’s father turned this age. He seemed ancient and used up. But then he… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder One of the blessings of living in the United States of America is freedom of speech. No American needs to ask permission to state his mind, whether in public or in private. This freedom is recognized as a fundamental right—the kind of right that the Declaration of Independence calls “inalienable.” What is… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder The summer has not gone as I intended. Of course, many folk can say the same, what with the restrictions imposed in the wake of COVID-19. That’s not what I mean, though. I saw those restrictions as an opportunity. Suddenly my entire summer schedule opened up. I didn’t have a single speaking… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, spoke of the “unbought grace of life.” What he meant was that we receive from our forebears a patrimony of ideas, perspectives, habits, attitudes, and sensibilities that together make life more humane. We pay nothing for this patrimony: it is given to… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder After two days of the rioting in Minneapolis, I had occasion to visit with a friend—I’ll call him Simon. Simon is nearly my age and has recently retired from two simultaneous careers: as a police detective and as a platoon sergeant in the National Guard, with whom he served multiple deployments in… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder Robert G. Delnay arrived at Denver Baptist Theological Seminary when I was beginning my Middler year during the late summer of 1980. He came to the school both as dean and as a professor. In the latter capacity he taught Greek, homiletics, and church history. The Greek class met at 7:00 AM… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder Whether American churches are really facing a new Dark Age is debatable. What cannot be doubted is that ministry has become more complicated. We live in an increasingly secular culture that confronts Christians with new challenges. Christianity will not be conserved in its integrity without pastors to provide conservative leadership. Consequently, schools… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder Anybody who gets into the business of predicting the future is on hazardous ground. None of us can see even one second into our future. Only God can, and where He does not reveal it to us, we had better admit ignorance. What we can do, however, is to project trends and… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder Twenty years ago almost no reputable college, university, or seminary offered distance education. In fact, “distance ed” was one of the marks of a diploma mill. Nevertheless, the new computer technologies, and especially the internet, were about to provide platforms that could be used for widespread experimentation in distance education. An early… Continue Reading
Kevin T. Bauder By every indicator, historic, mainstream fundamentalism is a shrinking movement. Churches are shrinking. Fellowships are shrinking. Mission agencies are shrinking. Schools have closed and those that remain are scrambling for students. Furthermore, the churches are producing fewer young people who feel any sense of calling toward vocational ministry. From an educational perspective,… Continue Reading