Find the False Friends!
I'm editing some Puritan prayers for a new Lexham Press project, and I'm really enjoying the edification provided by these wonderfully eloquent, godly Christians of yore. But I am most certainly keeping my thinking cap on as I read (that's my job), because the project includes a slight modernization—which basically means a translation from one form of English to another, an overlapping one. The key concept of Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, "false friends," has come in...
Review: Educated, by Tara Westover
My heart goes out to Tara Westover. I rooted for her and felt defensive for her during 100% of the story. Other people’s epistemological sins harmed her. Precisely because of her love for her parents, those sins maintained a hold on her far, far into a life that, on the outside, looked “normal.” Obviously, hare-brained conspiracy theories are not harmless fun; they can radically stunt human lives and break vital relationships. And yet this refugee from turmoil managed to write a truly...
An Authorized Milestone
I've just achieved a milestone with Amazon reviews of Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible. I now have every important kind of review there is. I have five-star reviews, I have one-star reviews, and I have just gotten the coveted "my book showed up as promised" review. It usually takes a while before that happens. I, like my book at that man's house, have arrived. I have reached a couple less important milestones, too: I have literally been cursed with an imprecation (see...
Prescriptivist Descriptivism
This is exactly where I'm at: Either you smugly preen about the mistakes you find abhorrent – this makes you a so-called prescriptivist – or you show off your knowledge of language change, and poke holes in the prescriptivists’ facts – this makes you a descriptivist. Group membership is mandatory, and the two are mutually exclusive. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I have two roles at my workplace: I am an editor and a language columnist. These two jobs more or less require me to be both a...
Interview Questions for Iain Provan of Regent College
In your book, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, you pointed out that the early church father Irenaeus did not argue based on his episcopal authority but on the basis of what Scripture said. You drew a contrast here with Martin Luther’s theological opponents, who, you said, “displayed a strong preference for appeals to episcopal authority over against argument based on or even involving scripture.” How important is a vernacular Bible to the Lutheran and Protestant tendency you...