We're created in God's image, but our souls or spirits are not offshoots of God's own Spirit - as New Age teachers would have us believe.

Knowledge has come to be defined as what can be proven by secular evidence and arguments.

Only a loving and covenant-making personal God can provide humans with unique dignity, worth, and rights. Blind nature cannot do that. So, for the Christian, "secular humanism" is an oxymoron.

The biblical writers assumed many things about reality that modern, Western people do not assume because we've been conditioned by our cultures to assume otherwise.

For Christians ultimate reality is and can only be a personal, sovereign, holy, and loving God. But even some Christians, under extra-biblical and even anti-Christian cultural influences read the Bible as pointing to something not ultimate, such as material wealth, health, happiness, power, etc.

Before you disagree make sure you understand. In other words, we must make sure that we can describe another's theological position as he would describe it before we criticize or condemn. Another guiding principle should be 'Do not impute to others beliefs you regard as logically entailed by their beliefs but that they explicitly deny'.

The Heidelberg Catechism rightly says, for all Christians who allow the Bible to absorb the world for them - who see reality through the biblical story - that the purpose of life is to glorify God - a personal being who is ultimate over us and everything else - and enjoy him forever. This should be clear to all Christians, but many Christians have been influenced to think otherwise even about the Bible because of dabbling in movements such as the New Age Movement or the Gospel of Health and Wealth or even naturalistic humanism.