Sadness over Southern
I can hardly put Gregory Wills' history of Southern Seminary down, and I'm willing to call it a must-read for conservative evangelical and fundamentalist seminarians. It was thrilling to read of Boyce and Broadus' doctrinal rigor and foresight, and it's been deeply saddening to read how quickly all their life-spending labors were co-opted by the "mediating" theology of E. Y. Mullins. How different our whole country might be if the SBTS founders' vision and doctrine had maintained control at...
Biblical Love 2: Response to the Father of Friends of This Blog
Don Johnson, a Canadian pastor and father (and father-in-law, respectively) of my good friends Duncan and Meg Johnson, offered a response to my last post on love, a post in which I argued that love is not an action: I have defined agape love as an act of the will for a long time. I haven’t done a comprehensive study for a while, but tonight took a quick look at the verbs agapaw and philew in the NT. Agapaw appears as an imperative 10 times in the NT. Philew never appears as an imperative. I...
Kathy Bell’s Art Show
If you're in the Greenville, SC area, you need to check out the show that's currently up in the Sargent Art Building. It has to be my favorite of all the dozens I've seen there over the years. My old calligraphy teacher, Mrs. Kathy Bell (wife of Bob Bell, my Hebrew teacher, and mother of David Bell, my Freshman English teacher), has produced God-glorifyingly creative, beautiful, skillful pieces that were a thrill to experience. Her work is classic without being stodgy, and it was a trip to see...
The New New International Version
The much-maligned TNIV will be no more. A newly revised NIV will come out in 2011, the 400th anniversary of the release of the KJV. I did not realize that the NIV had not been updated since I was in preschool. The NIV is the most popular Bible translation in English, and it is always worth checking during Bible study because its somewhat more interpretive renderings do—despite what I grew up hearing—come from a basically conservative evangelical background. For example, the spokesman for the...
Biblical Love
First Corinthians 13:4–7 is a list of fifteen specific actions that love performs on behalf of other believers. That should immediately dispel the notion that love is primarily a feeling or an emotion. Although true love will carry emotion with it sometimes, feeling is not a necessary ingredient of love, nor is it the basis. Therefore, biblical love is not a feeling: it's an action.1 A blog named after love has a duty to define love correctly. Or at least, this blog-named-after-love does. The...