J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life by Leland Ryken My rating: 4 of 5 stars One of my favorite evangelical jokes showed up in a Christianity Today a number of years ago. It was an ad for a (fake) new book called The Collected Blurbs of J. I. Packer. The joke, if you...
ChurchLife
Insightful Quotation from Francis Spufford
This quotation has really caught my fancy recently as a good summary of the way conservative Christians are viewed by the surrounding culture in Western nations: Believers aren’t weird because we’re wicked. We’re weird because we’re inexplicable; because, when there’s...
Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption
I finally got my copy. It's the culmination of my nine years at BJU Press and the one book of mine most likely to actually get read: Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption, a 12th grade Bible textbook for Christian and home schools. But I can't say the book is...
Everybody’s a Separatist
Everybody draws the line somewhere. Centered set or bounded set, there's a line out there they won't cross. The question is whether or not that line will be established by Scripture. Roger Olson, in the post I just linked to, does a good job showing why the prosperity...
Sing a Better Song Apologetics
I thought this was a really great illustration from my friend Jeremy Larson: When Odysseus schemed to evade the Sirens, whose beautiful song enchanted and ultimately destroyed sailors, he had his crew put wax in their ears and ordered them tie him to the mast. The...
Augustine on Inerrancy
I searched for probably two hours for a fantastic Augustine quote I simply cannot believe I didn't save or blog already. I could not find it anywhere, and I'm pretty OCD with my notes and files. So I resorted to Quora. Thank you, Quora! I asked, St. Augustine once...
Stigmas Aren’t All Bad
One of the missions of contemporary culture, perfectly consistent with the grand narrative of liberalism, is to destigmatize various identities and behaviors traditionally considered sinful in Christendom. Identity and behavior can't finally be separated, of course,...
Kurt Aland Says “Nein” to Textual Errors in the New Testament
Interesting video featuring legendary New Testament textual critic Kurt Aland: At the very end of the video there is an interview with Aland, and from it I took the following stills. First the interviewer (in German, of course) asks Aland whether there might be any...
Wise Observation from Ken Myers
C.S. Lewis said one of the distinctive aspects of the modern mind is the assumption that newer things are always better. We've become preoccupied with things we don't have, rather than with the nurturing and stewarding of things we do have. My favorite example of this...
Our Embarrassment of Translational Riches
We have an embarrassment of riches in our English Bible translations. Today I was texting a particular man whom my church's outreach ministries have had a lot of contact with over the last few years. The last time I spoke with him he was in a very bad situation, and...
The Reading Level of the KJV
I love the King James Version; it deserves its honored place in English church history. Its words will never leave my heart. But to be honest, I have trouble reading it in places—even though I grew up with it. And this is a concern to me, because I want to understand...
Avoiding the Temptation to Snark…