Serious comments only, please. I want to ask you to think and think hard about what Jonathan Edwards is saying in the following excerpt. If my experience (and, I recently found out, that of Tim Keller) is any guide, you're going to have a hard time understanding him...
Piety
Terrorism and Evangelism
Here's another little helpful and challenging quote I read in Total Church. At present the military and economic might of Western nations is struggling to counter the threat of international terrorism. It is proving difficult to defeat an enemy made up of local cells...
Faith, Hope, and Love, These Three
Ἀγάπη (agape) love is often said to be an action given independent of the worth of the person loved. But if you follow the exegetical data, it's more like "faith," which all recognize is worth only as much as its object. Hope is the same.
The iPod Touch, Neil Postman, and Mount Calvary Baptist Church
A friend and fellow iPod Touch owner sent me Tim Challies' "Don't Take Your iPod to Church" a few days ago and asked me what I thought. It just so happens that I do take my iPod Touch to church and take voluminous sermon notes on it, but that friend made some good...
Metametametalanguage
I'm writing a blog post about a blog post about an Internet article about the use of the Internet. So here goes. Click here for Alan Jacobs' comments on this New York Magazine article. Jacobs is a bit of a Christian Neil Postman sometimes. He helps me, anyway, look at...
In the Nick of Time
Kevin Bauder of Central Seminary is always worth hearing. And this blog hears him. It's my firm desire that this blog never be what he describes in the last line of the following paragraph of this excellent, timely essay: These young [fundamentalist] leaders are aware...
Love and Hate; ἀγαπάω and μισέω
If hate is the opposite of love, as many passages indicate, then why don't we have a book called The Four Hates? Why don't preachers fulminate against the scary hate of a mother for her crying infant (ἀστοργέω [a + storge]), the emotional hate of one's ex-best-friend...
Good Friend Graduates!
Congratulations, Dustin!
ἀγάπη Rejoinders
I recently posted a few of the kinds of statements my dissertation is opposing. For example, a Bible textbook avers, "Love is not an emotion, but an act of the will. Feelings may ebb and flow, but love remains constant." Let me now offer a few rejoinders: "Love" as...
Regeneration and the Second Great Commandment
May the absolute necessity of regeneration never stop me from doing good to my neighbor when it is in my power to do it. A ... combination of theological principle and careerist caution meant that [Billy] Graham’s critique of segregation never went nearly as far as...
Outsourcing Prayer
"Information Age Prayer,” provides “a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day.” For $3.95 a month, you get “the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or...
Enduring Counsel from B.B. Warfield
I regularly return to this enduring counsel from B. B. Warfield—required reading for all BJU seminarians who take Systematic Theology: A minister must be learned, on pain of being utterly incompetent for his work. But before and above being learned, a minister must be...