Thomas Watson’s The Doctrine of Repentance is, in my opinion, a must read for all Christians. Watson’s explication of biblical repentance is humbling and encouraging.
On turning from sin and turning to God, Watson writes:
Archives For Misc
Today marks the 11th anniversary of 9/11. It has been 11 years since I sat in 10th grade Social Studies class and heard the news that NYC had been attacked.
National Geographic has offered this 45 minute documentary for free streaming. The Lord is good.
Continue Reading…
Dr. David Alan Black, professor of New Testament and Greek at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently blogged (August 25, 2012) some helpful advice for seminary students who are contemplating pursuing a doctorate. Black’s advice was spurred on by a post by biblioblogger Brian LePort (Near Emmaus) where LePort laments the current realities of finding a biblical studies professorship. Leport writes in his post “You’re going to be an adjunct and it is going to be terrible“: Continue Reading…
Though still unconfirmed it appears It is now confirmed, Mark Driscoll is stepping down as president of Acts 29, the church planting network that has now planted over 400 churches in the United States. There is some overlap between Acts 29 and the Southern Baptist Convention, as some SBC churches also belong to the Acts 29 Network. Acts 29 has been well-received by many Southern Baptists, while others see the network as a threat to the convention. Continue Reading…
Agree or disagree, the folks at Invisible Children have pierced the hearts of mainstream humanity with their widely viewed Kony 2012. The video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and his crimes has now reached almost 80 million views on YouTube alone (sorry Vimeo).
With such exposure, it is a certainty that criticisms and concerns will be voiced regarding the intentions and desired outcome of those at Invisible Children. Because of this, they have released a new film answering some of the most common and meaningful questions.
Recently, Truett Seminary’s professor of theology Dr. Roger Olson shed light on his low view of the Old Testament in a comment on his blog. Olson states:
I would go so far as to say that we should not focus on the cultural meaning, the circumstances, etc., except out of historical interest. Everything we need to know about God and salvation is in the New Testament. The OT was types and shadows. It provides some context for understanding the New Testament, but it provides nothing essential for doctrine or practice that Christians cannot find in the NT.
Source: Regarding Old Testament “Texts of Terror”: Comment #25098
The post itself has many disappointing comments about the Old Testament and Olson’s “interpret everything through a lens of love” theologizing, but his comment in view shows where the rubber meets the Marcion-esque road he is traveling. Continue Reading…
Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina and its pastor Steven Furtick are currently holding an 11 day revival called Code Orange Revival. The line-up of speakers is certainly not without controversy as T.D. Jakes, Ed Young, and Perry Noble make the list. Amazingly, Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church in Highland Village, TX, is also one of the speakers. Chandler is from my experience and knowledge theologically solid, sound, and generally well respected. Interestingly, Chandler’s sermon at Code Orange Revival did not make the original slotted rebroadcast time. The sermon was cut out from the rebroadcast only to air the next morning. 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.
Today in class, my Hebrew/OT professor mentioned a recent study on the authorship of the Hebrew Bible using a computer algorithm. The software divided the Hebrew text into two categories: priestly and non-priestly. Regardless of one’s view of this type of study, the results are very interesting.
Israeli software aims to shed light on the Bible
Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible.
The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.
When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same division, separating the “priestly” and “non-priestly.” It matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90 percent – effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.
“We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method,” the Israeli team announced in a paper presented last week in Portland, Oregon, at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The team includes a computer science doctoral student, Navot Akiva, and a father-son duo: Nachum Dershowitz, a Tel Aviv University computer scientist, and his son, Idan Dershowitz, a Bible scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The places in which the program disagreed with accepted scholarship might prove interesting leads for scholars. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, is usually thought to have been written by the “priestly” author, but the software indicated it was not.
View the article in its entirety here.
Back in 2001, Dr. Tom Ascol wrote an article for The Founders Journal titled, The Pastor As Theologian. I recently came across it via a random google search and was blessed to read it. The editorial addresses an issue that has been on my mind for some time; the pastor as a learned theologian. Ascol begins the editorial with a humorous but concerning experience:
The story is told of two seminary professors who were walking in a cemetery when one said to the other, “Look, two men are buried in this grave.” His colleague asked, “How do you know?”
“Because the tombstone says, ‘Here lies a pastor and a theologian.’”
Unfortunately, that is an all-too-common conception. In both the academy and the church the opinion largely prevails that one can either be a theologian or a pastor, but surely, one cannot be both.
I confronted this mentality twenty years ago during an interview with the head of the PhD program at a well-known, conservative theological seminary. When asked what my ministerial goals were, I responded, “To be a pastor.” The interviewer replied, “Then I don’t know why you would want to pursue PhD studies in theology, since this degree is really designed for scholarly, theological research. You would never use it in the pastorate. In fact, I only know of one man who is a pastor that uses his PhD very much in his church, and that’s Jim Boice [the late pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, PA]. And if you asked him, I think he would tell you that you really don’t need a PhD if all you want to do is pastor.”
The man meant no slight to the office of pastor, I am sure, but his comments betray an attitude which has wreaked havoc on biblical Christianity in recent generations. The idea that depth of learning and theological concern should be relegated to the classroom while the “practical” aspects of Christianity should be reserved for the church is deadly. It was perverse when liberals espoused it in the first half of the twentieth century and it is no less diabolical when advocated–even if subtly–by conservatives.
Read the article in its entirety here.
Tim Challies (blogger, author, web designer, podcaster, family man, all around nice guy) runs one of the most well known Christian blogs on the internet. Tim has been been blogging since 2002 and over these years his site, challies.com, has worn quite a few different designs. I thought it would be neat to visit the wayback machine and view some snapshots of Tim’s site over the years.
Tim’s current site design has been an inspiration to me and has influenced my own blog. If you look closely at my blog you will notice a few hat tips to Tim’s blog. I am a sucker for web and graphic design and really enjoy Tim’s current blog design. As for his past designs…I will let you be the judge of that. Continue Reading…
