I just saw that Tom Schreiner’s forthcoming commentary on Galatians is already available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I’ve already had a look at this one, and it’s one you’ll certainly want to buy when it’s released. Pre-order here.

Timothy George gave an outstanding address today in Southern Seminary’s chapel on the perspicuity of scripture. His text was the encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. It is here that Philip asks the quintessential hermeneutical question: “Do you understand what you are reading” (Acts 8:30). George runs the gamut of church history focusing particularly on the reformers and their contribution to this doctrine. This is worth your time to listen to. Watch it above, listen below, or download here. [audio:http://www.sbts.edu/media/audio/fall2010/20100928george.mp3]

I was grateful to receive a copy of Stuart Scott’s new book The Faithful Parent: A Biblical Guide to Raising a Family (co-authored with Martha Peace). Boyce College‘s own Heath Lambert will be using it as textbook in his counseling courses next semester, and Lambert has this to say about the book.

I was grateful to receive a copy of Dr. Bruce Carlton’s new book Strategy Coordinator: Changing the Course of Southern Baptist Missions (Regnum, 2010). Carlton is a missions professor at Boyce College, and in this book he takes a critical look a dominant paradigm within Southern Baptist missions. From the introduction: “The overall objective [of this book] is to seek to answer the primary research questions, ‘What is the extent of the impact and influence of the non-residential missionary/strategy coordinator paradigm on Southern Baptist missiology over the past twenty years?'” Readers interesting in specialized, missological scholarship will want to take a look at this work. Get it here.

Sometimes pearls of hermeneutical wisdom can be found in unexpected places. I stumbled upon one the other night in Wendell Berry’s excellent novel Jayber Crow, and it has to do with the proper way to interpret stories. Jayber says it this way: “Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.”

Justin Taylor links to an excerpt from John Piper that is so helpful, I simply want to reproduce it here. It’s from Piper’s sermon “Do You See the Glory of God in the Sun?“, and you can read it below. I also want to direct readers to Piper’s six strategies for fighting sexual sin: “ANTHEM: Strategies for Fighting Lust.” There is one other sermon that you should take the time to listen to instead of reading: “Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, Part 2.” My prayer is that these words will land where they need to.

Scot McKnight passes along a question about the centrality of complementarianism in the theological commitments of the “young, restless and reformed.” In short, the question is this. Must one be a complementarian in order to be “gospel-centered”? Why should “young, restless and reformed” egalitarians be divided from their complementarian counterparts? Since both groups have a similar commitment to the gospel, the penal substitutionary atonement, justification by faith alone, etc., why should they be divided from one another over a secondary issue? These are fair questions, and they have been addressed by complementarians here and there over the years. I will attempt an answer here, though I do not claim to…

It is standard fare among Old Testament scholars to assume that the biblical book of Daniel was written in the second century B.C.—well after the fulfillment of the prophecies contained in that book. Jim Hamilton highlights a 1990 essay by Gerhard Hasel that shows the implausibility of the late date in light of evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hamilton concludes: “This evidence inclines me to think that those who persist in dating Daniel to the Maccabean era do so for uncritical, dogmatic reasons. Namely, their religion (historical critical naturalism with its priesthood of archeologists and orthodoxy of unbelief) dictates that they must not believe in a God who inspires…