Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Safely Home

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This week my wife and I listened to the audio book of Randy Alcorn‘s novel Safely Home (Tyndale House, 2001). We finished the six audio CDs last night after our church’s cross-centered Good Friday service. The novel is excellent, and it was a means of grace for both of us. It helped broaden our horizons on multiple levels (e.g., re persecution of Christians in China in particular and a heavenly perspective on persecution in general). Highly recommended.

It’s available in the following formats: paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audio download, and audio CD.

Related resources:

  1. introduction to the novel
  2. excerpt: chapter 1
  3. discussion questions
  4. a biographical note from Randy (including this: “100% of royalties from Safely Home will go to help persecuted Christians and to spread the gospel in their countries.”)
  5. articles on China (including this: “Is there still persecution of Christians in China today?“)
  6. articles on the persecuted church
  7. readers’ responses
  8. a 43-second clip of Randy talking about the book:

Coming Soon: Logos 4.0

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Bob Pritchett, founder and president/CEO of Logos Bible Software, just posted this in the newsgroups:

Logos 4.0…

…keeps what you love about Logos Bible Software

…gets rid of what annoys you in Logos Bible Software

…puts things where you’d expect them

…is still in development

…reflects an obsession on ease-of-use

…remembers things

…helps you share the fruit of your study with students and congregations

…has simpler menus

…comes with massive, hand-edited data sets

…favors direct manipulation over large settings panels

…is the iPhone of Bible software

…gives more screen space to content

…searches with the speed and ease of Google

…searches just your quality content (not the morass Google has to wade through)

…works well with multiple monitors

…makes smart guesses about what you are looking for

…looks very cool

…is under tight wrap until “the big moment.”

HT: Phil Gons

It Is Finished

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That’s what Jesus said on the cross some 1,980 years ago.

That’s why “Holy Week” pictures like these are so sad.

Comment 66 is mine:

Thanks for the quality photos. As usual, they are first-class. I profit immensely from looking at the photos posted here each week.

The actions captured in these photos, however, simultaneously sadden and infuriate me. This is not pure Christianity as found in the Old and New Testaments. These are warped traditions that have turned the good news about Jesus Christ on its head.

For an explanation of why Jesus died (and why acts like self-inflicted wounds are not only unnecessary but actually offensive to God), see John Piper’s book The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die. Free PDF here.

Interview with Rolland McCune on Systematic Theology

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cross-posted on SharperIron.org

Relatively few people agree with every single position taken in any comprehensive systematic theology, but it is valuable to consult a large number and wide variety of systematic theologies in order to understand how others correlate God’s revealed truth. For this (secondary) reason alone, a new multi-volume systematic theology by veteran seminary professor Rolland McCune is definitely worth adding to one’s ST collection.

About Rolland McCune

Rolland McCune (b. 1934) is former president and current professor of systematic theology at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, where he has taught since 1981. He is the author of Promise Unfulfilled: The Failed Strategy of Modern Evangelicalism.

Dr. McCune had a massive influence on me in college and beyond. In my review of Promise Unfulfilled (to which McCune kindly responded), I noted this:

In the summers of 2000 and 2001 (following my sophomore and junior years of college), I was privileged to take two seminary classes at DBTS from McCune. I stocked up on his lengthy course syllabi and devoured them (about 900 pages on systematic theology as well as lectures on hermeneutics, apologetics, and the like). I have listened to dozens of his audio lectures and sermons, read his journal articles, interacted with former students (including one of my former pastors) who esteem him as their mentor, and interacted directly with him a bit (e.g., I interviewed him for my dissertation on Keswick theology). His thinking is rigidly logical, his conclusions firm, his commitment to God and His word immovable, and his character unquestionably above reproach.

I slowly and thoroughly read through McCune’s 900 pages of systematic theology notes at least three times in college and early seminary. I knew his positions so well that my friend Matt Hoskinson used to call me “McCune,” and when we were taking theology classes together, he’d ask me during class discussions, “So what does McCune say?” <grin>

About Rolland McCune’s Systematic Theology

Now McCune’s systematic theology syllabi are being published in a more polished form, and the first of three or four volumes is hot off the press.

Rolland McCune. A Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity. Vol. 1. Allen Park, MI: Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, 2009. xiii + 443 pp. [desk copies available]

The book is much better documented than his syllabi (though the footnotes are unusually small and I miss the syllabi’s numbered headings). Two endorsements appear on the back cover:

This is the systematic theology set for which many of us—especially those of us who had the privilege of studying under Dr. Rolland McCune—have been waiting. Rolland McCune is one of the clearest thinkers in the theological world today, and in this set he systematically combines the interpretations of Scripture that many of us have wished to find in a single theology set. Highlights include a presuppositional apologetic, a single source (Scripture) as the only rule for theology, cessationism [sic] of the miraculous gifts, pretribulational premillennialism in eschatology, a dispensational structure of God’s progressive revelation, recent creationism, and a Calvinist soteriology. In addition, McCune has gained a comprehensive knowledge of evangelical theological works in his lifetime, and hundreds of footnotes saturate the pages of this work. It is highly recommended.

Larry Pettegrew, Th.D.
Vice President of Professor of Theology
Shepherds Theological Seminary, Cary, North Carolina

Rolland McCune’s Systematic Theology of Biblical Christianity is written for pastors and preachers by a theologian with a heart for pastors. Concise yet thorough, academic yet pastoral, simple yet profound, Dr. McCune has managed to provide a much needed theological resource that will be of immense value to both pastors and academicians. His balanced, biblical approach is refreshing. Careful scholarship and thorough research are evident on every page. This will be a tool that serious students of the Bible will find themselves turning to again and again.

Sam Horn, Ph.D.
Senior Pastor, Brookside Baptist Church
Vice-President for Ministerial Training and Graduate Studies,
Northland Baptist Bible College

An Interview with Rolland McCune on Systematic Theology

1. How many years have you taught systematic theology on the seminary level? About how many semester-long or block systematic theology (ST) classes (not courses) have you taught?

I have taught for 42 years in the general field of ST: 14 years at the Central Baptist Seminary of Minneapolis (1967–1981) and 28 years at DBTS (1981–2009). I taught elective theologies (e.g., dispensationalism, Kingdom of God, and OT theology) while a prof of OT for 11 or 12 years, and ST and Apologetics almost exclusively for the remainder.

I would confess that my theological class hours in seminary studies and in teaching are beyond my present abilities to calculate, or even estimate. [Read more…] about Interview with Rolland McCune on Systematic Theology

Doug Moo on Theological Humility

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This is convicting. Maintaining the kind of theological humility that Moo describes below is no easy task. It’s like walking on an extremely narrow path with steep drop-offs on both sides.

  1. On the one hand, theologians can be overly confident about their positions. They can even become pugnacious and arrogantly close-minded.
  2. On the other hand, they can be insufficiently confident about their positions (e.g., epistemological pseudo-humility). They can be noncommittal and even become compromisingly ecumenical.

What follows is from the “contemporary significance” section of Doug Moo’s comments on Romans 11:33–36 in Romans (NIVAC; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), pp. 391–92:

Theological humility. To my mortification and my family’s delight, I received in the mail just this week an invitation to join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). [Moo was born in 1950.] I have reached a point of life in which I find myself prefacing many things I say with “at my age.” Undoubtedly, as my children insist, some of the sentences that follow reflect hardening of the arteries or irrational fear of anything new. But a few of these statements, I trust, reflect some wisdom that the perspective of age has inculcated. [Read more…] about Doug Moo on Theological Humility