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“:
- What Is the Gospel? (1 Cor 15) followed by Q & A
Jeremiah
D. A. Carson
Graham Cole: “Do Christians Have a Worldview?”
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:
- Questioning the Question
- A Touchstone Proposition
- Pascal’s Pensée No. 12
- The Book That Understands Me
- Creation
- Fall
- Rescue
- Restoration
- Describing: Is It Enough?
- Has Christianity A Worldview?
- Assessing Frames of Reference or Worldviews
- An Invitation
- P.S.: Understanding the Book That Understands Me
- Annotated Bibliography
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!
Don Carson’s Advice about Two Ways to Approach Writing a Dissertation
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.
Paradoxical Humans and Your Worldview
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]).
ETS and SBL
This morning I returned home from San Diego, where I attended the annual meetings for the Evangelical Theological Society and the Society of Biblical Literature. I immensely enjoyed the sunny weather in San Diego (where I lived in 1994–1995 and where Jenni and I honeymooned in 2004), seeing and making new friends, and buying and browsing books!
“Preach the Word”: A Festschrift for R. Kent Hughes
Crossway just released a superb book on preaching in honor of Kent Hughes:
Leland Ryken and Todd A. Wilson, eds. Preach the Word: Essays on Expository Preaching: In Honor of R. Kent Hughes. Wheaton: Crossway, 2007.
- See Crossway’s description of the book as well as its contents, introduction and chapter 1 as a PDF, and back cover.
- You can read the entire book online here.
- D. A. Carson‘s “Challenges for the Twenty-first-century Pulpit” (pp. 172–89) is exceptionally insightful.
Review of Barnabas Lindars’s “New Testament Apologetic”
[I prepared the following book review for D. A. Carson‘s Ph.D. seminar “The Old Testament in the New” in fall 2006 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I chose to review this book last year partially because its author, Barnabas Lindars, was Carson’s “doctoral father” or mentor for his Ph.D. at Cambridge University. Willem VanGemeren, the director of the Ph.D. program for theological studies at TEDS, had encouraged Ph.D. students to get to know the professor whom they would like to be their mentor for the Ph.D. program. One important way to do that, he suggested, is to read and become very familiar with that professor’s works as well as the works of that professor’s mentor.]
Lindars, Barnabas. New Testament Apologetic: The Doctrinal Significance of the Old Testament Quotations. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961. 303 pp. Out of print.
New Testament Apologetic (henceforth NTA) was the first major published work by Barnabas Lindars (1923–91). It was the published version of his B.D. thesis submitted to Cambridge University, where he would later serve as an assistant lecturer (1961–66). (F. F. Bruce adds that Lindars’s B.D. “is not as other B.D.s are; at Cambridge it takes precedence over Ph.D.!” [Review of Barnabas Lindars, New Testament Apologetic, Modern Churchman, n.s., 5 (1962): 170.])
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Carson and Moo on the Contribution of Revelation’s Eschatology
D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), pp. 721–22 (bold emphasis added):
If, as we have argued, Revelation focuses on the end of history, then it is in the area of eschatology that it makes its most important contribution. Nowhere are we given a more detailed description of the events of the end; and while many interpreters have been guilty of finding far more specifics in John’s visions than his symbolism allows and of unwisely insisting that only their own circumstances fit those specifics, we should not go to the other extreme and ignore those details that John does make relatively clear.
But it is shortsighted to think of eschatology simply in the sense of what will happen in the end times. For the End, in biblical thought, shapes and informs the past and the present. Knowing how history ends helps us understand how we are to fit into it now. Particularly is this so because the New Testament makes it clear that even now we are in “the last days.” Thus, Revelation reminds us of the reality and severity of evil, and of the demonic forces that are active in history. . . . At the same time, the degree to which Revelation exhorts believers should not be neglected. . . .
John’s visions also place in clear relief the reality of God’s judgment. A day will come when his wrath will be poured out, when sins will have to be accounted for, when the fate of every individual will depend on whether or not his or her name is “written in the Lamb’s book of life.” Equally clear, of course, is the reward that God has in store for those who “keep the word of endurance” and resolutely stand against the devil and his earthly minions, even at the cost of life itself. John’s visions are a source of comfort for suffering and persecuted believers in all ages.