Three authors who knew a lot more when they were older, but were glad they had written their books when they were younger:
John Wesley: “Nay, I know not that I can write a better on The Circumcision of the Heart than I did five and forty years ago.”
C. H. Dodd in 1958: “I have not attempted any such radical revision [of 1920’s The Meaning of Paul for Today] as w...
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How should a theologian respond to a popular book that includes unsound teaching? The popular book I'm thinking of is The Shack, by William P. Young. After getting dozens of questions about The Shack, I wrote a review of it in early 2009. Actually, I wrote five reviews of it, in five different voices, partly so nobody could accuse me of not understanding that IT'S JUST A STORY...
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And here is the epic conclusion to my sleep-talking adventures from graduate school. (Click here for installments 1, 2, and 3.)
I'm sure I still talk in my sleep, but probably not as much as back in the day. During the time my wife took these notes, I was reading assigned theology all day every day, staying up late into the night, and hating to get out of bed. At any rate, t...
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Installment 3 of 4 in this series of transcripts of my sleep-talking adventures from the late 90s. No, I cannot explain most of these.
***
Something about a surgeon
Getting ready to cut something out of someone
[who?]
Part of the time it was me.
Part of the time it was some guy I didn’t know.
[Is he a good surgeon?]
Yes.
***
Some motivational speaker.
He’...
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Transcript 2 of 4 in the annals of the sleep-talkin' theologian. These notes date from about 1997. My long-suffering wife, a morning person, asks me questions like "when do you want to wake up?" and "what are you dreaming about?" Still asleep, I answer her questions. Sometimes she interjects ideas into my dreams, and I accept them. She's especially fond of lobbing kittens in.
...
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There's a man in England, Adam Lennard, who talks in his sleep. He speaks very clearly, says truly bizarre things, and is recorded by his wife's voice-activated digital recorder. His wife has begun blogging his nightly oracles, and their blog is suddenly the Next Big Thing: millions of readers, interviews on talk shows, merchandise, the whole viral internet treatment. Check out...
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To follow up Fred Sanders' review of my book I have posted a short excerpt from Education for Human Flourishing published by IVP Academic.
The passage below describes the difference between rhetoric and knowledge, and how important it is for us to be able to distinguish between the two.
Rhetoric Versus Knowledge
It is easy to feel defeated and confused given daily cultur...
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In one sense, portraying the Holy Spirit in baptism icons is not a problem at all: the Spirit descended in the form of a dove. The iconographer does not need to try to get behind this simple assertion of the New Testament to ask "why a dove?" For the most part, painters just seem grateful to have been given a concrete, visible way of depicting this most mysterious and elusive...
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Ignorance allows certainty, but punishes with narrowness. Ignorance grants ease of mind, but produces costly errors.
No place is this more evident in American culture than in those ignorant of Christianity. They think they know what Christians believe, but do not. They cheerfully dismiss with almost no thought serious truth claims made by religious thinkers. They revel in th...
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In 1750, after two earthquakes hit England, Charles Wesley wrote two small volumes of hymns on earthquakes. It is not too much to say that he developed a whole theology of earthquakes, in song. They answer the question, when a believer's country is struck by such a disaster, what should that believer say, or sing, to God?
Here is hymn #5 from the first collection.
Go...
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Christ in icons of the baptism is identifiable just as he is in any painting or icon: his traditional bearded face, and a halo (nimbus) with a cross inscribed in it. Of course there are exceptions: the Arian baptistery in Ravenna featured a beardless Christ, and in the post-Renaissance West, halos fell out of popularity from time to time. But identifying the Son of God is nev...
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In this leisurely exploration of the image of the baptism of Christ, we finally turn to a description of the three persons of the Trinity. They are linked in the center of the image by the vertical beam of light, running down from the Father through the Spirit to the Son.
The question of representating God the Father in an icon raises the entire problem of the justificati...
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