James White has partnered up with Ivey Conerly to do a response video to Kamal Saleh’s “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus | Muslim Version” which was a response to Jefferson Bethke’s “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
Archives For Apologetics
The Defend the Faith School of Christian Apologetics Conference will be taking place down in New Orleans at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS) January 8-13, 2012. Yes this is during the BCS Championship between LSU and Alabama that is taking place right down the road on the 9th, but take heart, the schedule allows a time for us all to watch.
What is the NOBTS Defend the Faith Conference, you ask?
Per the official website:
Defend the Faith is a week-long (5 nights, 5 days) school in Christian Apologetics training that features quality biblical, philosophical, and theological instruction and outstanding worship. Speakers include Gary Habermas, Bob Stewart, James Walker, Mary Jo Sharp Robert Bowman, Timothy McGrew, Steve Lemke, Mike Edens, Scott Drumm, Mark Rathel, and many others. Topics covered include Science and Christianity, the New Atheism, the Resurrection of Jesus, the Reliability of the New Testament, Islam, World Religions, Mormonism, New Age Spirituality, Postmodernism, the Historical Jesus, the Problem of Evil, and other issues related to the defense and proclamation of a biblical worldview.
In D.A. Carson’s book Exegetical Fallacies, the fallacy of “inadequate analogies” is addressed. When I think of inadequate analogies, two particular analogies come to mind: 1. Norman Geisler’s “kids in the farmer’s pond” found in Chosen But Free, 2. Paige Patterson’s “Pearl Harbor sailor” in Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism. In both analogies, the authors fail to properly portray fallen man as totally enslaved to sin and in rebellion against God and his Christ. In Geisler’s analogy, man is portrayed as a person drowning in a pond, aware of his plight, and desiring to be delivered from said plight and imminent death. Similarly, in Patterson’s analogy, man is portrayed as a drowning sailor who was blown off his ship by a kamikaze fighter, aware of his plight, and desiring to be delivered out of the water and his current state. These analogies utterly fail to represent the reality of natural man’s fallen condition and relationship with sin. Though Patterson admits, “if analogies are pressed, they all break down” (Whosoever Will, 43), this is not an excuse for an inadequate analogy. To quote Carson: “for an analogy to be worth anything, the elements of continuity must predominate at the point of explanation” (Exegetical Fallacies, 122).To provide an example of an inadequate analogy, Carson turns to Donald M. Lakes’ He Died For All: The Universal Dimensions of the Atonement. Continue Reading…
Justin Taylor has posted a short account of a certain Biblical Greek student’s experience in college and how God’s grace radically changed not only his semester but his entire life.
“In my first year of Greek at Biola University, I nearly failed the subject. The professor, Dr. Harry Sturz, had compassion on me and gave me a passing grade. I took a different professor in second-year Greek. He gave us a battery of exams at the beginning of the semester. One exam each week. I failed the first exam. I failed the second exam. I failed the third exam. I failed the fourth exam, but it was a high F! And I got a D on the fifth exam. “Hey,” I thought, “I’m really getting this Greek thing down!”
The professor called me into his office and told me that I should check out of Greek. That was the wake-up call I needed. I went down to my dorm room, got on my knees, and confessed to the Lord that I had dragged his name through the mud. I reasoned that since I am in Christ and he is in me, he was failing Greek, too. And even though I was at a Christian school, I was soiling his reputation. I repented of my sin—the sin of mediocrity because I was surrounded by Christians, the sin of thinking that I did not need to do my best since I was a Christian.
I went back to the professor and asked for one more chance.”
Find out how the story ends and who the student is over at Justin’s blog.
