In the first weekend of December 2008, D. A. Carson preached five sermons in Seattle:
Here are videos of the first two:
Fascinating statement:
Ehrman proves the dictum that old fundamentalists never die; they just exchange fundamentals and continue in their unimaginative, closed-minded rigidity and simplicity.
-William H. Willimon, review of Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer, The Christian Century, December 30, 2008.
John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003) includes this convicting paragraph (pp. 45–46):
An American Tragedy: How Not to Finish Your One Life
I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: “Look, Lord. See my shells.” That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t buy it. Don’t waste your life.
(Don’t Waste Your Life and the study guide are available for free as a PDFs.)
I just became aware of a related 32-page booklet:
John Piper. Rethinking Retirement: Finishing Life for the Glory of Christ. Wheaton: Crossway, 2009.
Rethinking Retirement is already available for free as a PDF. (I must have missed it when Desiring God highlighted this on October 7, 2008.)
Mark Driscoll’s (and Gerry Breshears’s) Death by Love: Letters from the Cross (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008; cf. the official website) includes a chapter entitled “‘Lust Is My God’: Jesus Is Thomas’s Redemption.” Here’s how Driscoll movingly concludes a brutally straightforward letter to a man named Thomas, who is enslaved to lust (pp. 67–68):
What scares me most is that I am so very much like you. We both grew up poor. We both grew up as highly competitive jocks. We both grew up smarter and tougher than most of the people we knew. We both saw our first porn magazine at an early age. We both had sex with our first girlfriend in our teens. We both had violent tempers that intimidated other people. We both graduated with honors as good students and respected leaders. We both went to college intent on fighting, partying, and having a lot of sex with hot girls.
Yet, unlike you, Jesus grabbed me by the neck and redeemed me from the life I was pursuing. I thought I would get married some day, have a few kids, make a lot of money running some company, commit adultery and look at porn on the side (but seek to manage it so that it did not affect my family), lose my temper now and then to cuss out my wife and kids, and still attend church occasionally, because I considered myself a good spiritual person.
Since Jesus redeemed me from the life I was headed for, things could not be more different. To be honest, I am actually quite surprised that I have been faithful to my wife since I met her in 1988. I’m equally surprised that I have not been in a fight since Jesus redeemed me.
The truth is that you and I are exactly alike in every way but one. Despite the fact that I have not lived in sexual sin as you have, the Bible says that regardless of all the “good” things I did as a non-Christian, I was corrupt and dominated by sinful desires at the core. By redeeming me from one way of life and redeeming me to another way of life, though, Jesus has done something remarkable for me and has saved me from myself. My life is going well; much better, in fact, than the life I had planned for myself. He has given me a new heart so my deepest desires are like his. None of it, however, is the result of my own doing, because I am not a great guy; rather, Jesus is a great God.
Thomas, as I heard your story some weeks ago, as I have prayed for you since, and as I write this letter today, I have to confess that it has really troubled me that, apart from Jesus, I think we’re basically the exact same guy. I don’t like to admit it, but we are pretty much the same except for the one difference that makes all the difference—Jesus has redeemed me. So, I’m praying that you turn from sin to him so that he can redeem you as well. If you do, let me know. Until then, I will pray. It all comes down to you and Jesus. You are more evil than you have ever feared, and more loved than you have ever hoped.
During the first weekend of December 2008, Mark Driscoll interviewed D. A. Carson about his life and ministry (download). The discussion ranges from questions about Carson’s parents and schooling to controversial aspects of his ministry in the church and academy.
The latest issue of Themelios includes the following review article that my wife and I coauthored:
Andrew David Naselli and Jennifer J. Naselli. “Theology for Kids: Recommending Some Recent Books for Younger Children.” [Also available in HTML.] Themelios 33:3 (2008): 120–25.
Excerpt:
Without pretending to be experts on theological children’s literature, we have sorted through recent theology books for younger children and compiled a short list of outstanding books. Other books are undoubtedly worthy of mention, but these are our favorites. What follows organizes them in three categories and ranks the books in order, beginning with our top recommendations.
The latest issue of Themelios was released today, and it is outstanding! (It is available as a 129-page PDF or in HTML.)
Kudos to Rod Decker for posting A. T. Robertson’s inaugural address at Southern Seminary in 1890: “Preaching and Scholarship.”
Jim Hamilton, associate professor of biblical theology at Southern Seminary, teaches both Hebrew and Greek. This week he shared some wise and motivating advice for beginning Hebrew and Greek students (though it applies in some ways to more advanced students, too):
I just updated my publications page:
My friend Chris Anderson introduces a new website: Church Works Media (RSS feed). The site includes some contributions from Joe Tyrpak, a gifted, godly young pastor and one of my close friends (e.g., he’s one of my accountability parters).
Bob Kauflin testifies,
Even though I’m usually associated with a more contemporary style of music than what is found on this site, I deeply resonate with the values of ChurchWorksMedia.com. In my interactions with Chris Anderson over the years, his desire to faithfully communicate in song the truth and wonder of God’s Word has been unmistakable. I’m glad to see the hymns he and others have been writing gain a wider audience through this website.
I finally joined Facebook. I hope I don’t regret it.
If you’re a member, how would you suggest using this tool in a God-glorifying way?
Related:
Here are a couple of interesting paragraphs from Greg Beale’s latest book, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008).
In fact, there is an increasingly popular attitude that the Chicago Statement and the term inerrancy carry significant “fundamentalist baggage,” with all the negative associations that go with the word fundamentalism (e.g., narrow, obscurantist, anti-scholarly, unsophisticated). I have found that this perspective is also shared by some more conservative biblical and theological scholars. This is not the place to discuss the origins of the word fundamentalism and the development of the use of the word. Suffice it to say that what appears to be “fundamentalist” is in the eye of the beholder.
J. I. Packer in his “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God has given a nice, brief discussion of the origins of fundamentalism and how the word has come to be used. Though that was written in the late 1950s, his basic points still hold. There he distinguishes a fundamentalist view of Scripture from an evangelical view, the latter of which he subsequently identified with the Chicago Statement on inerrancy since he himself was one of the more well known among its signatories in 1978 (p. 21).
This morning my pastor, Mike Bullmore, finished his sermon series on 1 Corinthians with a sermon on 1 Corinthians 16 entitled “What We Should Do with Our Money” (8.6 MB; 37:48 long). Mike hit a home run with this one. It’s an excellent example of how to preach on giving. He approaches it with just the right tone and spirit, and he avoids the errors of both legalism (e.g., “Christians must give exactly 10% of their gross income or else they are robbing God!”) and libertinism (e.g., “Christians are not required to tithe” with the implication that giving is optional).
Here’s a brief overview/paraphrase of the sermon (which, of course, does not adequately convey how Mike preached it): Continue Reading »
I just read s-l-o-w-l-y through a 44-page article for the third time. (The last time I read it was fall 2006.) In my view this is the most brilliant academic article that D. A. Carson has written:
D. A. Carson. “Mystery and Fulfillment: Toward a More Comprehensive Paradigm of Paul’s Understanding of the Old and New.” Pages 393–436 in The Paradoxes of Paul. Vol. 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism. Edited by D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 181. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004.
It richly repays repeated, thorough readings. But be warned: it’s dense. What follows is an uneven summary that doesn’t do it justice. (Read the whole thing. It’s worth the price of the book, which amount to a little less than $1 per page.) Understanding this article will help one make connections between the OT and the NT more richly.
Note: Italics in quotations are in the original. Continue Reading »
The below list does not reproduce a particular chart from D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo’s Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), but it is based on the text. They roughly date the twenty-seven New Testament books as follows (though the exact order of the twenty-seven books is fuzzy, e.g., re the prison epistles):
Last Sunday morning my pastor, Mike Bullmore, included a bulletin insert with twenty-six book recommendations and brief comments. I’ve published it here with Mike’s kind permission, and I’ve updated it in several ways:
Mark Dever interviews D. A. Carson: “Observing Evangelicalism with Don Carson” (73-minute MP3). The interview occurred on June 13, 2008 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and 9Marks just released it this week. (It is part 1 of 2.)
This morning a friend emailed me a thoughtful question in response to reading my post last night about the contest between King Darius’ three bodyguards.
I just read your post on 1 Esdras. Very enjoyable to read! I don’t think I have ever read much of the Apocrypha before, but this has piqued my curiosity. Are there any redeeming reasons for reading it? If there are, I would like to know them so I can be aware of them as I read.
Yes, I think that there are redeeming reasons for reading the Apocrypha. Even though Protestants reject its canonical status, the Apocrypha continued to be included between the covers of most English Bibles as late as the nineteenth century, and even the King James Version of 1611 included it. Although many English translations printed a small disclaimer that the Apocrypha was not on par with the Old and New Testaments, it was nonetheless between the same covers with sacred Scripture. The 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible was the first English Bible printed without the Apocrypha. So what was the Apocrypha doing in all those English Bible? Christians believed that it possesses spiritual value. How so? I’d suggest at least three ways that the Apocrypha is valuable: Continue Reading »
And what biblical warrant is there for this easy way many have of talking about “forgiving myself”? In the domain of pop psych, we all know, more or less, what we mean. But in the matrix of Wright’s discussion of what forgiveness is and entails, you have to have two parties to talk about forgiveness: the offender and the offended. Forgiving oneself is, quite frankly, incoherent. One can accept God’s forgiveness, and the forgiveness of others, and press on in various ways. But talk of forgiving oneself merely has the effect of muddying the crispness of the earlier discussion.
-D. A. Carson, review of N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, RBL (April 23, 2007): 7-8 (emphasis added).
See my two reviews: (1) Scholar's Gold and (2) PNTC, BECNT, and NIGTC (three NT commentary series)
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