Excellent, Edifying (and Even Entertaining) Sermon on a Controversial Topic
My thinking—and my soul—really profited from this sermon by Kevin DeYoung. The thoughts were not new to me, since I'd read his excellent book The Hole in Our Holiness, but I had forgotten how engaging (and humorous) he was in person. One of the newest reasons I've come across—and one of the most powerful—for hewing to an expository preaching method is the "balance" in emphasis (if you can call it that) between God's sovereignty and human responsibility. Some years ago I realized I had fallen...
Moral Esperanto
I shared with you not long ago MacIntyre's opening illustration in After Virtue, an illustration drawn from Canticle for Leibowitz. In it, all scientists are killed in retribution for a nuclear holocaust. Over time, people try to regain the language of science. They have the vocabulary—neutrons, atoms, relativity, gravity—but they lack the framework in which those terms make sense. This is our moral world, MacIntyre argues (and I believe he's right). Here's another illustration from MacIntyre...
Illustrating the Etymological Fallacy
I love words, and I love languages. I'm always running across little interesting tidbits when it comes to words; often those tidbits have to do with etymology. There is a logical fallacy that should immediately come to your mind when you hear that word "etymology." It's called the etymological fallacy, the root fallacy, or the genetic fallacy. It's the idea that a word means what it used to mean (or what it originally meant when coined). Sometimes that's true. Eleemosynary, for example, comes...
Review: Five Views on Apologetics
Five Views on Apologetics by Steven B. Cowan My rating: 3 of 5 stars Once upon a time, a fellow Christian young man, age 20 or so, like me, invited me to go witnessing in the downtown area where I live. We ran into a young lady who was reading Neale Donald Walsch's then-popular Conversations with God, some of the worst claptrap ever to proceed from a printing press. I won't give specifics, but as I began to speak my partner began to feel uncomfortable with my approach. Deeper than that, he...