I heard Reza Aslan in an interview on NPR a few weeks ago describing to a fawning* interviewer his book Zealot, a brand new title which purports to describe "The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth." I got the definite impression that Aslan (what a sadly ironic name!)...
Mark Ward
The Ten Tenets of a Covenantal Apologetic
I'm reading through Scott Oliphint's new Covenantal Apologetics. He's one of the few people with the stature to propose that the name "presuppositionalism" be dropped—and he may very well be successful. But his approach is clearly in the same tradition. "Covenantal"...
Review: Canon Revisited: Establishing The Origins And Authority Of The New Testament Books
Canon Revisited: Establishing The Origins And Authority Of The New Testament Books by Michael J. Kruger My rating: 5 of 5 stars For many years I have felt that canon was my Achilles' Heel as a Protestant (wannabe) theologian. I felt the sting of the charge that I am a...
Read moreMost evangelicals today no longer forbid going to the movies, nor do we engage in earnest Francis Schaeffer-style critiques of the films we see—we simply go to the movies and, in the immortal word of Keanu Reeves, say, “Whoa.” We walk out of the movie theater amused, titillated, distracted or thrilled, just like our fellow consumers who do not share our faith. If anything, when I am among evangelical Christians I find that they seem to be more avidly consuming the latest offerings of commercial culture, whether Pirates of the Caribbean or The Simpsons or The Sopranos, than many of my non-Christian neighbors. They are content to be just like their fellow Americans, or perhaps, driven by a lingering sense of shame at their uncool forebears, just slightly more like their fellow Americans than anyone else.
—Andy Crouch, Culture-Making, 89.
Andy Crouch
Most evangelicals today no longer forbid going to the movies, nor do we engage in earnest Francis Schaeffer-style critiques of the films we see—we simply go to the movies and, in the immortal word of Keanu Reeves, say, "Whoa." We walk out of the movie theater amused,...
Review: Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal
Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal by T. David Gordon My rating: 4 of 5 stars Like most of us, T. David Gordon is a professional media ecologist and a former conservative Presbyterian pastor. Okay, perhaps that combination is not so...
Kim on Carr on How Our Tools Shape Us
Joseph Kim at Second Nature quotes Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain…. I used to find it easy to immerse myself...
Are People Basically Good or Bad?
For as long as I can remember, the idea that people are basically good has been taken to be a tenet of theological and political liberalism. The idea that people are basically bad has been presented to me as a tenet of Christianity—and this tenet has been held by both...
Authoritative Application?
My respected friend Joel Arnold probably does need to leave this country, as he currently plans to do. What he says is downright un-American: Believers have not obeyed God's commands until they are willing to make authoritative and spiritually guided application of...
Stanley Fish Paper Published in Answers Research Journal
I've been kind of super excited about this... I have finally thrown my tiny pebble into the pond! Now I'm just waiting to watch the ripples. Well, it's probably more like this: I have finally thrown my grain of sand into the ocean! Now I'm just waiting to be bitten by...
The Kingdom of Christ
I'm embarrassed to say I did not know this, more embarrassed to admit that I never thought to ask: The move toward a Kingdom theology [among both covenantalists and dispensationalists] ... accounts for the name of the newer form of dispensationalism. It is called...