There is practically a cottage industry online of quote mining secondary sources to criticize the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. These quotations usually omit salient elements of those sources that would make them useless to the anti-Trinitarian polemicists. An example I recently discovered was the use of the early twentieth-century author William Ralph Inge to support the charge that the Nicene Creed represented a Platonist distortion of Christianity. Carlos Xavier, a Biblical Unitarian apologist, provides a good example of this usage:
Thirdly, a strong argument can be made for the fact that the Nicene creed is in reality a Platonic creed. . . . William Inge, the famous professor of divinity, admitted that “Platonism is part of the vital structure of Christian theology.” Dr. Inge added that if Christians read Plotinus, who worked to reconcile Platonism with Scripture, “they would understand better the real continuity between the old culture and the new religion, and they might realize the utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces.” So that early Christianity “from its very beginning was formed by a confluence of Jewish and Hellenic religious ideas.”[1]
To the casual reader—and especially to the anti-Trinitarian reader predisposed to view the matter in this way—these quotations from Inge might seem to confirm the opinion that Platonism corrupted Christianity. Continue reading
As I noted in my previous post on the 2025 Ligonier/Lifeway 
What do most members of evangelical churches in America believe? As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the Ligonier/Lifeway 
“The trouble with this way of defining evangelical is that it creates both false positives and false negatives.”
Jane Goodall (1934-2025), famed for her decades-long study of chimpanzees and for her advocacy of animal rights and environmentalism, passed away on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. Christians should have no trouble appreciating her legitimate and significant contributions to our knowledge about chimpanzees and other primates. Goodall observed that chimps made and used rudimentary tools (e.g., stripping a twig of leaves and using it to extract insects from a nest) and that they exhibited emotions and sociality. Gaining fuller and more accurate knowledge about the animal kingdom helps us to clarify what we have in common with animals and what makes us truly unique. At the same time, we may be saddened by the fact that Goodall promoted a mystical, more or less pantheistic conception of the world in which the divine is in all things, excluding the reality of a transcendent Creator with whom we need above all to have a loving relationship.
“Like many people (not just Mormons), the Bald Coder assumes an oversimplistic, false dichotomy in which comprehensive scientific proof and subjective opinion are the only two options.”
In a 
I can’t stand it. I just can’t stand it when scholars play fast and loose with the facts.
Posts are showing up on Facebook arguing that it is theologically incorrect to affirm that the incarnate Christ is “fully God and fully man.” Supposedly, these expressions should be avoided in favor of the creedal wording “truly God” and “truly man.” One individual claimed that “the orthodox” have rejected the description “fully” in this context. (I’ll just comment right here that there is zero support for this claim.) Another claimed that these expressions “misrepresent” orthodox Christianity, even asserting that the only correct word to use in this context is the word “truly.” A common complaint is that “fully” is at best “sloppy” and is at least potentially heretical. The basic argument against the word “fully” is that it supposedly leads to or implies the contradictory position that Jesus is only God and that he is only man, rather than both God and man.