I need your help. If not now, when? If not you, who else? The other reader of this blog?! But you kind of have to know a little Greek—or at least know the letters and basic ideas about conjugation. Here's my problem: BDAG, the standard Κοίνη Greek lexicon, is telling...
Dissertation
Dissertation Update
I won’t be graduating this May. That’s the short of it. The long of it is that I will probably graduate in August and that I may even be a “doctor” before May—but not in enough time to walk in the ceremony. I do not know when my defense will be, though the committee...
Dissertation Update
These are my official due dates for the dissertation. All are Fridays: Defense Draft—March 11 (five copies, spiral bound) by 5 p.m. Dissertation Defense—March 25, two weeks later. Records Office Draft—April 1. Registrar's Draft—April 15. I will need God’s grace to get...
Yes! Yes! Yes!
I ran across this in my Theological Journal Library in Logos a few weeks ago, and I literally laughed with delight. Maybe you'd have to be living in the country I live in right now (Dissertationastan) to find this as perfectly glorious as I did, but perhaps people in...
Dissertation Completed—Sort Of!
I have reached the end of the dissertation, but I'm 3,395 words over my absolute top word limit and I have some editing to do anyway. I hope to accomplish that today. I praise the Lord for in-laws who let me work in their basement for two weeks (they got time with...
Ceslas Spicq on Luke 6:34
In the last few chapters of my dissertation I am planning on using Ceslas Spicq, a Catholic scholar of the 20th century, as somewhat of a whipping boy. No doubt he was much smarter than I and much more widely read (in both senses!), but there are some significant...
Ticker Updated
Two big chapters just got approved, so my Dissertation Word Count Ticker has been duly updated. Thank you for your prayers, those who have prayed. I've been able to accomplish much by God's grace in recent months. I have some major distance left to travel, but I'm on...
The Fear of Aslan
I just wrote a little section in my dissertation on the fear of the Lord. Proverbs 1:7 reads, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” Fear (יִרְאָה) in this verse is certainly used often in the phrases “fear of God” or “fear of the Lord,” but it is also...
Chapter 3 Approved
Praise the Lord: chapter 3 of the dissertation sailed through smoothly. Please pray that chapter 4 would do the same. Thank you to those who have prayed for me. I've updated my word-count ticker.
Intellectualism/Voluntarism and Evidentialism/Presuppositionalism
I’ve been digging into an old debate for my dissertation, the one between intellectualists and voluntarists. There is considerable variation in each category, probably more in the latter, but there are some common threads in each. Basically, intellectualists think...
Charles Hodge on Love in 1873
I rarely do this, but I felt Hodge was worth quoting at length (I added paragraph breaks and updated the Scripture reference format): Love in us includes complacency and delight in its object, with the desire of possession and communion. The schoolmen, and often the...
Chapter 2 Approved! Dissertation Tickers Updated!
I've decided to enhance my dissertation tickers rather than spending time writing my dissertation. The first ticker now shows how many words have passed all the way through the pipeline and how many I have written (basically three-ish additional chapters in various...