The Briefing published a thoughtful three-part series by John Woodhouse (the Principal of Moore College since 2002) after his addresses at the Reform National Conference in Swanick, UK, in October 2001.
The introduction to the first article and his conclusions to all three give the sense of his argument:
Layton Talbert. Beyond Suffering: Discovering the Message of Job. Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 2007. 378 pp.
Last summer I reviewed the above book, and the review is now available here:
Review of Layton Talbert, Beyond Suffering: Discovering the Message of Job. Trinity Journal 28 (2007): 298–300.
[Read more…] about Review of Layton Talbert’s “Beyond Suffering: Discovering the Message of Job”
Last weekend D. A. Carson spoke “at the Castle” in Northern Ireland on (1) the gospel and (2) Jeremiah.
Here are the most recent additions to my post entitled “D. A. Carson MP3s“:
Jeremiah
A series of thoughtful essays are forthcoming via Christ on Campus Initiative. The essays are (1) by evangelical scholars, (2) geared for campus evangelism, and (3) edited by D. A. Carson.
Christ on Campus Initiative (CCI), a non-profit organization generously supported by the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding (a ministry of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and the MAC Foundation. CCI exists to prepare and circulate materials for college and university students, addressing an array of fundamental issues from a Christian perspective. Readers and organizations may circulate these essays without charge.
These articles will be made available as PDFs, and the first article in this series was just posted this afternoon: a 26-page PDF by Graham Cole entitled “Do Christians Have a Worldview?”
Here’s the article’s outline:
The answer to the title’s question is a qualified Yes and No. Christianity is not technically a worldview, but the Bible’s storyline establishes a worldview.
Read the whole thing, and spread the word!
Mark Dever‘s “The Five Points of Criticism” is insightful and wise.
The five points:
Update: Jonathan Leeman adds a sixth point: ending with a word of encouragement.
Today Christianity Today posted Doug Sweeney‘s “My Top Five Books on Church History.”
Don Carson’s review of Chris VanLandingham’s Judgment and Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul includes sound advice about two ways to approach writing a dissertation (Carson’s advice also applies to writing a research paper):
I frequently tell my doctoral students as they embark on their research that dissertations in the broad field of the arts disciplines, including biblical and theological disciplines, can, at the risk of slight oversimplification, be divided into two camps.
[1. Deductive Approach] In the first camp, the student begins with an idea, a fresh insight, a thesis he or she would like to test against the evidence.
[2. Inductive Approach] In the second, the student has no thesis to begin with but would like to explore the evidence in a certain domain to see exactly what is going on in a group of texts and admits to uncertainty about what the outcome will be.
[1] The advantage of the first kind of thesis is that the work is exciting from the beginning and directed by the thesis that is being tested; the danger is that, unless the student takes extraordinary precautions and proves to be remarkably self-critical, the temptation to domesticate the evidence in order to defend the thesis becomes well-nigh irresistible.
[2] The advantage of the second kind of thesis is that it is likely to produce more even-handed results than the first, since the researcher has no axe to grind and is therefore more likely to follow the evidence wherever it leads; the danger is that there may not be much of a thesis at the end of the process, but merely a lot of well-organized data.
In reality, of course, dissertation projects regularly straddle both camps in various ways. But VanLandingham’s work neatly falls pretty exclusively into the first camp. That makes for interesting reading. Unfortunately, VanLandingham’s work also demonstrates in a superlative fashion the dangers of this sort of approach.
Daniel L. Migliore observes that humans are paradoxical:
“We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel” (Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology [2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004], p. 139).
How many worldviews can adequately account for that? Christians account for it with the Fall in Genesis 3 and by tracing harmatiological trajectories all the way through to the consummation in Revelation 21–22. The Fall is an essential component of the Bible’s storyline; without it we’d have a hard time making sense out of reality.
The Fall, however, is only part of the frame of reference necessary for making sense out of reality. That frame of reference is supplied by the Bible’s storyline. For a thoughtful presentation of that storyline, see chapters 5–6 in D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), pp. 193–314.
See also chapters 2–3 in D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming [Spring 2008]).
