Dissertation Update 42
A few weeks ago I got word that my dissertation defense had been moved; it's now set for Monday afternoon, May 2. Please do pray for me if you think of it. I'm busy preparing for the defense; the full defense draft should be turned in this week by Friday at the latest. Here is a sneak peek at some of the slides I've got for the Keynote I'll show. All text is subject to radical change...
Four Encouragements for Those Who Sometimes Find Bible Reading Difficult
Do you ever stumble over the difficulty of some of the words of Scripture? It’s not just obscure places and people and practices in the OT; there are significant passages in the NT which are also quite difficult or ambiguous. Here are some points that might help you: Someone as intentional about his speech as Jesus—He got every word from His Father (John 8:28)—was never accidentally unclear. If something He said was in any way ambiguous or difficult, He meant it to be. Sometimes, as a good...
SBL Bible Book Abbreviations
The Society of Biblical Literature has a series of standard abbreviations for Bible books. I particularly appreciate the fact that they do away with the unnecessary period. If you use Mark Ward’s Microsoft Word Miracle Macro, you’ll need to use these as well for it to work properly. I left out equivalents for the OT and NT; you’ll figure them out. Update: BibleWorks comes with an SBL abbreviation set. Go to Tools> Options > Bible Versions > Book Names > Open > books_sbl.bna >...
Mark Ward’s Microsoft Word Miracle Macro
Back in September of 2003 I had this problem, see. I would often paste text into Microsoft Word that included "straight quotes" instead of “smart (curly) quotes.” I didn’t like having to go through and change them to curly, so I set up a macro. All it did was find and replace all quotation marks; Word’s auto-correct feature did the rest. Over time other common problems developed, so I added more code to what soon became my standard Word macro—kind of like an automatic diagnostic I use on...
John Frame on Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility
You’ll want to read this carefully (I added paragraph divisions to help you do so): It often comes as an exciting discovery that doctrines that seem at first glance to be opposed are actually complementary, if not actually dependent one on another. For Calvinists, for example, divine sovereignty and human freedom are examples of that sort of dependence and complementarity. Although at first glance those doctrines appear to be opposed to one another, a closer look shows that without divine...