Christmas Baby
A little cuteness for my snowed-in Greenville friends to enjoy. (If anyone happens to drive past my house in Taylors, can you let me know if any pipes appear to have burst or any tree limbs have destroyed the roof? I am a little concerned...)
Preserving the Truth Almost-Live Blog (Friday, Jan 7)
Instead of writing the last few pages of my dissertation, I’m at the Preserving the Truth Conference at First Baptist Church of Troy. Here are my notes from last night: Breakout Sessions Scott Aniol argued this, if I could boil it down: we can't have a-cultural church music; we're going to get our music from somewhere. So why would we choose music that is a pagan cultural expression of pagans to pagans? Culture is an expression of a complex set of values. Why not choose the music nurtured by...
Which Commentary Set Should I Buy?
If you’ve never used BestCommentaries.com, you’re in for a treat. You can search for commentaries by book, by set, and by author. I find myself most often searching by book, because on the Romans page, for instance, all the commentaries will be ranked by an aggregate of recommenders. John Dyer, the man who runs the site, has done an excellent job with it. And he recently (I think) added a chart showing how commentary sets stack up against one another. It will help you understand this post if...
The Singular We
A minor exegetical note that I'm sure I'm not the first to notice but did just now: Do you sometimes get the sense that Paul is using something like the "royal we" ("Unhand our royal person!"), that when he says "we" he means "me"? Here's some evidence that you were right. When we could bear it no longer, we were willing to be left behind at Athens alone, and we sent Timothy, our brother and God's coworker in the gospel of Christ, to establish and exhort you in your faith (1 Thess 3:1-2). "We...
MacLaren on Christ’s Teaching
Christ’s ‘originality’ as a moral teacher lies not so much in the absolute novelty of His commandments, as in the perspective in which He sets them, and in the motives on which He bases them, and most of all in His being more than a teacher, namely, the Giver of power to fulfil what He enjoins. Christian ethics not merely recognises the duty of love to men, but sets it as the foundation of all other duties. It is root and trunk, all others are but the branches into which it ramifies....