I'm at the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale Divinity School for a week taking a course on Edwards' Religious Affections. It's been fun and informative, especially our time viewing Edwards' manuscripts and our class discussions—which I had the honor of starting the...
Piety
The Great Vituperator
A sadly funny excerpt from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea: Mi-ran’s mother later told her that four of her father’s buddies in the mines, fellow South Koreans, had been executed for minor infractions, their bodies dumped in mass graves. Being a member...
Frame / Φρειμ / פרֵם
I wrote this for a Bible Truths lesson on evangelism: …that’s the extent of your responsibility—just faithfully, clearly, and lovingly deliver the message. The Bible compares evangelists to heralds, people whose job it was to journey to a faraway place and announce...
Buzz Off!
No, no, no, NO! Google Buzz lasted about four hours on my Gmail account. I admit, I don’t mind seeing my friends’ comments on Google Reader items (even though I’m trying to cut down on those, too…), but I simply do not need any more messages clamoring for my attention...
Romans 12:3–21
My good pastor has been urging his congregation with more heart even than usual to read their Bibles this year. As part of his exhortation to do that, he gave some practical examples from his own Bible reading of what he does to study. I think that was an excellent...
A Good Warning for Bloggers and Dissertation Writers
John Frame in “Machen’s Warrior Children,” regarding theological polemics in his community (and, let’s face it, ours): Overall, the quality of thought displayed in these polemics has not been a credit to the Reformed tradition. Writers have gone to great lengths to...
Incidentally…
While I was doing some research for a high school Bible lesson on gender roles, I ran across this article at the Council for Biblical Equality. The article includes this: Theologian Wayne Grudem wants us to believe that the Greek word kephale (translated into English...
Please Help!
Several years ago, in something like 2005 (?), I read an article (?) by an evangelical theologian (?) who had been an egalitarian. His story was something like this: I was an evangelical Christian egalitarian. My wife and I split our marriage in half: everything was...
The Love Chapter
You could be the world’s foremost orator, but if you aren’t motivated by love, you’re like a car alarm going off in a parking lot. You could give out God’s Word powerfully, know truth no one else does, and move mountains with your faith—but if you aren’t driven by...
God’s Will
Kevin DeYoung argues in the best-titled book of 2009 that God has a sovereign will and a moral will, but He does not have what is typically thought of as an individual will of direction. He has an individual will only in the sense of those two other wills: He has in...
Towel-reading
A true story from the teacher’s edition for a BJU Press Bible Truths textbook, which I’m now halfway through editing: A Christian college student interested in a Christian girl at the same school couldn’t decide whether dating her was God’s will. In an attempt to...
Love Thinketh No Evil
If you can reasonably interpret facts in two possible ways, God calls you to embrace the positive interpretation over the negative, or at least to postpone making any judgment at all until you can acquire conclusive facts. —Ken Sande, “Judging Others: The Danger of...