John Orlando 🇺🇸🇮🇹

Some thoughts on last nights election.

"Biblical Guidance for Parents of Prodigals" (Luke 15) sermonaudio.com/sermons/9122… – A talk given at Christ Church Presbyterian in Charleston, SC in which I share my testimony as I reflect on the ways in which the Lord used my parent's faith and pursuit of me in my conversion.

The 1st overture for consideration by the 54th #PCAGA has been received. The overture comes from Southwest Florida Presbytery and proposes to “Amend BCO 7-3 & 7-4 regarding Titles, Offices, and Unordained Roles.” pcaga.org/wp-content/uploads…

Men should not be put in women's prisons.

His pastoral instincts are fantastic. Protestants are kidding themselves if they don’t think he’s the most serious alternative to raw secularism in the Western world right now.

I was concerned that this man would descend into mindless drivel when he first started, and tried to direct him to solid information. He has no interest in such things, and his descent to that mindless drivel stage has been amazingly rapid. No person with the slightest level of intellectual integrity says this kind of stuff. Luther is spinning in his grave, going, "Why won't he read my best book?" (i.e., The Bondage of the Will). I recommended it to him but...well, we now see the kind of "research" D'Souza does. And that is his 5,000th straw man misrepresentation of "Calvinism." Someone needs to send him a straw man, already soaked in flammable liquids, as his trophy.

I am taking on the role of deconstructing their whole grift. In Jesus’ name.

DNA is the smoking gun showing that there is a Mind behind the universe: "Since Darwin’s day, a wide variety of people had taken an anti-evolution stance, but no one had built a positive case for Intelligent Design. But it is not enough to show the inadequacies of natural causes; we must go on to demonstrate the plausibility of intelligent causes. And the hallmark of intelligence is specified complexity. The structure of DNA is precisely parallel to the structure of languages and computer programs. Can we infer that specified complexity in DNA is likewise the product of an intelligent agent? Unless we define science from the outset in terms of naturalistic philosophy, the answer should be yes."

Since when did Joel Webbon talk like that? @Phil_Johnson_

In redemptive history, Israel is first a person (Gen. 32:28) then a corporate people. OT Israel typified the fulfillment of what was promised in Christ. He is the true Israel of God (Hos. 11:1; Matt. 2:15) who makes Jews and Gentiles Israel in him (Eph. 2:14–18; Gal. 3:28; 6:16).

Hello Mr. Kristol, The verse you cite is from Leviticus, right alongside the passages on same-sex relations that you so readily dismiss. But setting that aside, you're misreading the historical context. Leviticus 19:33–34 was written for Israel while the Hebrews were in the wilderness after the Exodus. There was no modern nation-state with fixed borders or an immigration system. Israel was a covenant community, not a country defined by territorial boundaries. A "sojourner" wasn't simply someone standing inside an invisible border. A sojourner was a foreigner living among Israel who accepted Israel's civil order and lived under its laws. That's why the same Torah you hijack says there should be "one law for the native and for the sojourner." The defining feature wasn't physical location... it was membership in, and submission to, the covenant community. Using Leviticus 19:33–34 as an argument against modern immigration enforcement ignores the historical and legal context in which the passage was written.

This cheeseburger-loving patriot just delivered the best speech of the PCA's General Assembly #pcaga

I’m excited to share a first look at Pasture — a new app designed specifically for iPhone and built to help pastors, elders, and church leaders care for the flock with greater intentionality. Daily follow-ups. Care logs. Focused care. Prayer tracking. Widgets. Milestone reminders. Coming soon. Follow to keep up. Beta testing starts after @PCAGA.

Yes

Seeing some response to my statement on @MikhailaFuller's podcast about speaking in tongues. Some potentially helpful clarification: First, I am not a cessationist (though I see myself being accused of it). I state in the interview that I believe that the spiritual sign gifts (tongues, prophesy, healing) still take place today, just not normatively like they were in the Apostolic era. Nonetheless, I hold to the standard exegetical position that biblical tongues refer to known languages. In Acts 2, the foundational instance, foreign speakers understood the disciples in their own native languages, establishing the clearest precedent for interpreting the phenomenon throughout Scripture. Secondly, while bliblical specialists and theologians debate whether tongues encompass human languages alone or include angelic speech, the consensus recognizes that a tongue functions as a language -- either immediately intelligible to hearers or requiring interpretation. The requirement that Paul places on interpretation in 1 Corinthians 14 indicates that tongues contain objective, propositional meaning subject to translation, and his statement that “every valid instance of tongues contains intrinsic, propositional meaning" reinforces this understanding. A prominent scholarly argument identifies glossolalia as “the miraculous ability to speak unlearned human and (possibly) divine or angelic languages,” with the most common usage of “tongues” referring to ordinary human languages. The term γλῶσσα throughout the NT carries two primary meanings: the human organ or a human language, and careful word studies demonstrate that it never denotes non-cognitive utterance. However, scholarly consensus isn’t absolute the core agreement across interpretations centers on cognitive content: tongues communicate meaningful, intelligible information rather than incoherent utterance. Third, the early church evidence after the Apostolic era is virtually unanimous: the Early Church Fathers consistently interpreted the gift of tongues as the capacity to speak the many languages used across the earth. Their writings indicate the gift served an evangelistic purpose enabling communication with non-Christian populations. The Patristics universally understood “tongues” in Acts and 1 Corinthians to refer to human languages, and ancient Christians understood the biblical gift of tongues as a miracle involving intelligible human languages. When the fathers described the phenomenon, they used concrete language: John Chrysostom wrote that believers “would suddenly speak in Persian, another in Latin, another in the language of the Indians or of some other people” (Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 35), and Augustine stated that disciples “spoke in the languages of all the nations” (Sermon 269, Sermo CCLXIX. The most significant, and almost exclusive, early figure associated with ecstatic speech for tongues was Montanus, a 2nd-century prophet whose followers emphasized speaking in tongues; he was actually excommunicated (not necessarily for his position on tongues) around AD 177. By the late 2nd century, ecstatic interpretations of tongues were present but only in context of ecclesiastical concern. One interesting nuance appears with Philastrius in the 4th century, who understood angels as capable of conversing in all languages and believed the apostles received this same ability at Pentecost. However, this doesn’t represent a departure from the “knowable language” framework rather, the Early Church Fathers understood the gift of tongues as the ability to speak all languages spoken by people. The Church Fathers agreed the gift was the ability to speak all languages known to humankind, an ability they ascribed to angels, suggesting the “languages of angels” would not refer to a distinct heavenly language but rather to the capacity to communicate with anyone encountered. The historical record shows no discussion among the fathers of ecstatic utterances, unknown languages, or supernatural unintelligible speech. The gift remained firmly anchored to practical, learnable human languages throughout Patristic interpretation. So if you've stuck around this long, I think my position is both exegetically and historically sound.

Great balance of showing compassion while sharing truth as Wes Huff responds to the question of why a good God would allow evil: "Well, that is arguably the hardest and most pressing apologetic question there is, because ultimately, the very tidy philosophical and theological answer isn't the right answer sometimes. You know, sometimes the right answer to the wrong question is the wrong answer, because I've encountered situations where someone has brought up a variation of the problem of evil to me, and I've just felt uneasy about maybe the tenor that they're coming at with the question...and asking them, 'You know, that's a great question. Why are you asking that question in particular?' and finding out once again (like the previous question related to it), they're personally hurting. And so, in that sense, I could give a tidy answer about if you're positing that something is good, you're positing that there's an objective good and evil, and if there's an objective good and evil, then you're positing an objective law, and objective law needs an objective lawgiver. So where do we find the groundwork for an objective lawgiver to begin with? Otherwise, you may not like certain things, but to say they ought not to happen is actually an ethical leap to an objective reality that you may or may not have groundwork for. But if that person is struggling because a family member of theirs has cancer, then that particular, maybe tidy, tied-up-in-a-nice-bow answer is not going to speak to them whatsoever. And so that's why that's the hardest question because there are actually very good answers to it, but often it doesn't speak to the person in front of you, because questions have questioners that sit behind them. And one of the pitfalls of my chosen field of ministry apologetics is that sometimes we give answers where we talk at people rather than with people. And there's a danger to that because the Christian faith isn't just an intellectual assent, right? It's a personal relationship. And that should also be played out in the answers that we give..."