Last night, I saw the Hughes Brothers’ new movie The Book of Eli. It’s been getting mixed reviews, and I honestly did not expect to like it very much.
I loved it. And now I desperately want to talk to people about it.
The problem is that the movie’s best kept secret (at least I didn’t know [...]
Tags: Abram, End of history, genesis, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, science fiction, The Book of Eli
Well, my intention to resurrect my programmatic reading of Scripture has foundered on the rocks of reconsideration. The problem is that in my intuition, first, of the value of pursuing the theme of obligation, and then, in my second formulation, of pursuing the theme of self-sacrifice, I have merely been clumsily approaching the issue of [...]
Tags: Bible-reading, Jurgen Moltmann, old testament theology, relationality, retraction, Scripture, self sacrifice, subversion, Walter Bruegemann, Walther Eichrodt
Faithful readers may remember my short-lived Bible commentating plan from earlier in the year. Here and here I began my project of reading through Scripture in search of “Obligation.” That project petered out due to the time-demands of the semester and—probably—methodological confusion with regard to what constituted an obligation. As the new year approaches, and [...]
Tags: cross, death and resurrection, glory of god, hypothesis, interpretation, Jesus, Obligation, old testament, redemption, resurrection of jesus, revelation, self sacrifice, topical study
Theology is a kind of theorizing.
Many people don’t realize this. For some, a document like the Westminster Confession of Faith would be demeaned if it were called a collection of theories. To be theoretical is to be ephemeral, debatable, even disprovable. But confessions are theoretical—ephemeral, debatable, disprovable—even much more generally accepted confessions, such as the [...]
Tags: apostles creed, Ben Myers, Bible, Christ's body, eyes of faith, nature of theology, reading scripture, scientific theory, Scripture, theoretical nature, theories, Vollenhoven, westminster confession of faith, word of god and the word of man
A good friend of mine, Jamin Hubner, has inspired me to incorporate a new way of reading Scripture into my devotions. Typically in the past my chief constraining intentions when reading the Bible have been covering a certain portion of it within a certain time, or else opening myself up to meditate upon a it [...]
Tags: biblical philosophy, coherent theory, devotions, hubner, logical conclusions, Obligation, prophetic witness, reading scripture
This is one of those telling but simple questions that distinguishes between the maze of superficially similar but fundamentally differing theologies. It has immense implications. For Protestants, the various issues that the question raises have a tendency to re-coalesce around another question: does the Bible explain life?
It’s very popular to answer “Yes!”
For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, [...]
Tags: abraham kuyper, american theologian, Bible, blaise pascal, calvinist tradition, Christ, creation science, destiny, evangelicalism, Gospel, human nature, life, Mystery, protestants, reinhold niebuhr, young earth
Against Expository Preaching
By Robert Minto in Criticism, Gospel, Preaching, Rhetoric, ScriptureI am currently reading Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, by Bryan Chapell. I haven’t finished the book yet, so some of what I am about to say may have to be modified at a later date. Still, I have some objections to this whole movement of expository preaching (to the degree that I’ve been [...]
Tags: barth, chapell, Christ-centered Preaching, commentators, expository preaching, John the Baptist, pointing, preachers, Preaching, witness