Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Carl Trueman

Ten Resources That Have Helped Me Make Sense of Our Current Culture and How Christians Are Responding to It

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In summer 2021 I prepared a talk for the young adults in my church on resources that have helped me make sense of our pagan culture. I recently updated that for the Spring 2022 issue of CBMW’s journal Eikon:

Andrew David Naselli. “Ten Resources That Have Helped Me Make Sense of Our Current Culture and How Christians Are Responding to It.” Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology 4.1 (2022): 116–41.

PDF | web version

These are the ten resources I commend and annotate (the first five are by non-Christians):

1. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018).

[Read more…] about Ten Resources That Have Helped Me Make Sense of Our Current Culture and How Christians Are Responding to It

Why, Where, and How Do We Draw the Line?

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The current issue of Tabletalk is on “Drawing the Line: Why Doctrine Matters.”

These two articles are particularly worth reading:

  1. DeYoung, Kevin. “Where and How Do We Draw the Line?” Tabletalk 36:7 (July 2012): 13–14. (Also on Kevin’s blog.)
  2. Trueman, Carl R. “Why Do We Draw the Line?” Tabletalk 36:7 (July 2012): 21–22.

DeYoung suggests and explains “seven steps we ought to pursue in establishing doctrinal boundaries”: [Read more…] about Why, Where, and How Do We Draw the Line?

Perspectives on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism

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The annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society is scheduled to take place in San Francisco later this month. The program is available as a PDF.

There are four prioritized reasons to attend this annual meeting:

  1. Network.
  2. Buy books.
  3. Meet re projects.
  4. Attend sessions.

This session may interest you:

Perspectives on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism

Thursday, November 17, 2011 | 3:00-6:10 pm | Parc 55 – Divisadero

Moderator/Introduction: Andy Naselli (The Gospel Coalition)

Presenters:

  1. R. Albert Mohler Jr. (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary): A Conservative Evangelical View on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism
  2. Kevin T. Bauder (Central Seminary): A Fundamentalist View on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism
  3. Carl Trueman (Westminster Theological Seminary): Response to Albert Mohler and Kevin Bauder

Panel Discussion

The discussion will be related to the book Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism.

Confront and Engage

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Carl R. Trueman, Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow  (2nd ed.; Fearn, Scotland: Focus, 2011), 8–9:

[W]ere I to write the book today, it would be different in certain respects. . . . I would want to modify, or at least off-set, my promotion of biblical theological teaching and preaching by emphasizing the need for the preacher to confront and engage his hearers. ‘Hey, I bet you never saw Jesus in this text before,’ is not an adequate application of the Bible; and yet too many so-called redemptive historical preachers and teachers in the Vos (or perhaps, to be charitable and not to impute the sins of the followers to the founder) pseudo-Vos tradition, consider their job to be done when they produced a nice, neat, dry-as-dust lecture on a passage which does just that and no more.

The Barber Who Wanted to Pray

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Our three-year-old daughter enjoyed this new book after it arrived in the mail yesterday:

R. C. Sproul. The Barber Who Wanted to Pray. Paintings by T. Lively Fluharty. Wheaton: Crossway, 2011. 33 pp.

It’s about Martin Luther teaching his barber, Master Peter, a simple way to pray.

You can read the whole book online here (“Preview the Book”).

Related: See Carl Trueman, “A Lesson from Peter the Barber,” Themelios 34 (2009): 3–5. Trueman’s article ends with this footnote (numbering added):

Martin Luther’s treatise on prayer can be found in the following works:

  1. Martin Luther, “To Peter Beskendorf,” in Luther: Letters of Spiritual Council (ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955), 124–30;
  2. idem, “A Simple Way to Pray,” in Luther’s Works (ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann; trans. Carl J. Schindler; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), 43:187–209;
  3. idem, “Luther the Confessional Theologian: A Practical Way to Pray (1535),” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (ed. William R. Russell and Timothy F. Lull; 2nd ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 12–17.

The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

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“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

That’s the opening line to Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

Carl Trueman plays on that title in his latest book: The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Chicago: Moody, 2011). (This 41-page book is available only electronically in the Kindle format.)

Some excerpts:

Is there an evangelical mind active today? Nearly two decades ago Mark Noll concluded any evangelical mind had gone soft through lack of use. Today the question is whether a healthy evangelicalism exists to host such a mind. I am not sure, theologically, that such a thing still thrives. (p. 13) [Read more…] about The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind