Peter Enns assumes there was a dominant world-picture or cosmology in the ancient Near East, and Paul Seely published several articles advocating the idea that the earth is a flat disk and the sky a solid dome in Westminster Theological Journal. In a comment on an earlier post, Steve Hays has drawn attention to an …
Category Archives: History
Hans Frei’s Central Idea
Thanks to Patrick Schreiner for pointing to this essay, in which William C. Placher describes Hans Frei’s central idea: Frei certainly never thought of himself as a “great theologian, ” but he did have a central passion, a central idea. That idea emerged through long study, in the 1950s and ’60s, of l8th- and 19th-century …
Halton on the Human Element of History
Reflecting on a post entitled “The Spiritual Ground of History,” Charles Halton describes a poignant moment in his own research: . . . as I was going through the cuneiform tablet collection that belongs to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. I was bogged down in trying to read from broken tablets and …
Axl Rose: Adopted Son of a Pentecostal Preacher
David Zahl has a theological interpretation of Axl Rose and Guns N Roses in three parts. Here’s a snippet from the first: So Axl is sadly the product of the worst kind of religion: ultra-bootcamp Pelagianism compartmentalized to the point of cruelty (not to mention completely at odds with its founder). It wouldn’t be a …
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J. K. Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Address: Failure and Imagination
In 2008 Rowling gave a stirring address at the Harvard commencement on the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. Some highlights: by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, …
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R. C. Sproul and T. Lively Fluharty, The Barber Who Wanted to Pray
If you’re needing a little encouragement to do family devotions, or if you’re looking to spur someone in that direction, you’ll want to get your hands on The Barber Who Wanted to Pray by R. C. Sproul and T. Lively Fluharty. This book is a great encouragement to be reading the Bible, singing the Bible, …
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George W. Bush Sounds Like Lincoln on Prayer
The conclusion of this must read article: I visited President Bush in the Oval Office one more time. I was thinking about doing a book about how Americans pray, and I had remembered that way back in Midland, he had advised me to read the Bible cover-to-cover, something I had done since then. He agreed …
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Fascinating Article on President George W. Bush
I haven’t even finished this article yet, but I find it riveting, informative, and inspiring. Enjoy.
Perseus Classics Free for Logos
The Perseus Collections will be released from Logos on September 30, 2011. If you pre-order them, you get them free. You read that right – free if you pre-order. Tony Reinke writes: The collection is a library in itself of over 1,100 ancient Greek and Latin titles and includes many corresponding English translations and helpful …
Three Reasons To Think the Earth Is Young
Wayne Grudem and others hold that the earth is old, but I’m unconvinced by their arguments for that position. Most prominent for me are two observations on textual details from Genesis and the way I want to interpret science and archeology from the biblical text rather than re-interpreting the biblical text in light of science …
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God Wins: An Interview with Mike Wittmer on His Response to Rob Bell
Credit where credit is due: the title of this post comes from Mike’s answer to the last question in this interview. Mike Wittmer’s book Christ Alone was written in response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins, and Wittmer’s book appeared within one month of the release of Love Wins. In this book Wittmer models charity and …
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Review of Paul Barnett’s “Paul: Missionary of Jesus”
Paul: Missionary of Jesus. After Jesus, vol. 2. By Paul Barnett. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008, xvi + 240 pp. $18.00 paper. Published in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15.1 (2011), 112–13. In this book Paul Barnett asks whether the mission and message of Paul the Apostle was the mission and message of Jesus of …
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Whittaker Chambers on Communists and Liberals
Whittaker Chambers’ book Witness is a thrilling spy story, an autobiographical conversion narrative, and a piercing look into the communist underground. Written with fervor, clarity, and solemn joy, Chambers is a prose stylist urging that we choose life. For Chambers, what separates communists and liberals is not a difference in belief. What separates them is …
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Whittaker Chambers on Why Men Become Communists
I was unimpressed with The Communist Manifesto, so I found Whittaker Chambers’ Witness very helpful for understanding why men become communists. Why do people become communists? What do liberals really want? What makes them tick? As I seek to understand people and answer these questions, what I find is that everything liberals and communists want …
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Be on Guard: The Point of Mark 13, with some thoughts on ‘this generation’
Mark 13 is not in the Bible to provoke debates about when all things will be consummated – what Jesus meant by “this generation.” Mark 13 is in the Bible to prepare disciples of Jesus against deception, fear, sleepy inattention, persecution, and uncertainty. In Mark 11 Jesus entered Jerusalem on a colt to cries of …
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Whittaker Chambers on C. S. Lewis
As I read Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, at several points the story drove me to look things up online, where I found a page that links to many of Chambers’ other writings. Somewhere I read Solzhenitsyn say that his writing resulted from his having been thrown headlong into hell and attempting to describe the experience. Chambers’ …
Whittaker Chambers on James Joyce
In the conclusion of his review of Finnegan’s Wake, Whittaker Chambers wrote this telling description of James Joyce, “Nono. In appearance Joyce is slight, frail but impressive. He stands five feet ten or eleven, but looks as if a strong wind might blow him down. His face is thin and fine, its profile especially delicate. …
The Pathetic Premises and Argumentation of “The Communist Manifesto”
Pathetic. Pitiful. Contemptible. Unbelievable. These are the words that come to mind as I try to come up with a way to describe the world-view reflected in The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is so bad, so naïve, so poorly argued that I do not think it deserves to be taken …
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Have You Read “Unbroken”?
What a book! Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken is a “true tall tale” (AP) powerfully told. At 19 in 1936, Louie Zamperini “was the youngest distance runner ever to make the [U. S. Olympic] team” (27). The 1940 Olympics were cancelled because WWII had begun (44). Zamperini was drafted and became a bombardier (45). May 27, 1943, …
Ghandi Was a Good Person?
Somebody knows this? For certain? See this article, which begins like this: “Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet ‘Great Soul’ also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a …