I agree with Justin Taylor who feels a tad embarrassed that he posts everything Carl Trueman writes. Contrary to what you might think (given all the links I give to Dr. Trueman), I am not getting paid for this. I really do think Trueman’s stuff is just that good. His latest essay for Reformation21 is a must-read: “Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic?” It’s a wry look at evangelicals who are obsessed with cultural analysis and cultural relevance. His contention is that an obsession with culture can undermine a Christian commitment to universal truths. He writes:
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Endorsements of Wright’s Response to Piper
Last week I posted a notice about Tom Wright’s forthcoming response to John Piper on the issue of justification. The work is titled Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. The book will be available in Great Britain from SPCK on February 1, and in the United States from Intervarsity in June. Intervarsity has already posted a webpage about the book and has included a list of interesting endorsements. I find three things that are striking about this list.
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Peter Williams Debates Bart Ehrman
Bart Ehrman recently debated Peter Williams on the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts (HT: Justin Taylor). The discussion took place on a British radio program called “Unbelievable.” You can sign-up for the podcast, download the mp3 here, or listen to it below. [audio:http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/f884634c-cd93-4002-a5fb-589cab03a90a.mp3] Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus is essentially the starting point for the discussion. The book narrates Ehrman’s own spiritual journey in which he went from being an evangelical Christian to an agnostic. Ehrman’s faith collapsed when his belief in inerrancy collapsed. In the book, Ehrman seeks to explain why a knowledge of the textual basis of the NT undermines inerrancy. I reviewed Ehrman’s book a couple of…
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Seyoon Kim on Anti-Imperial Interpretation
I’ve been working on a book review of Seyoon Kim’s Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke. In this book, Kim is arguing against the likes of N. T. Wright who contend that Paul includes coded political messages in his letters in order to subvert the Roman Empire. In reading through Kim’s work, I am struck by how similar his critiques are to the ones that I made in a recent article for JETS. We raise some of the same methodological questions, but our work is entirely independent of one another. As I was reading last night, I found one paragraph…
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N. T. Wright Responds to John Piper
Michael Bird has a preview of N. T. Wright’s response to John Piper on the topic of justification. Wright’s book is titled Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, and it will be available early next year. Here’s Bird’s description: “This book is a response to many of Wright’s North American critics and to John Piper’s The Future of Justification in particular. It is not a point for point reply to Piper but a general articulation of what Wright really thinks about justification with some hand-to-hand combat with Piper (as well as others such as Carson and Seifrid) along the way. Wright gives a very forthright defence of his position, but…
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Santa Claus is the Law. Jesus is the Gospel.
(HT: David Mathis)
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The Incarnation
There is hardly anything more mysterious and wonderful to me than the incarnation of Jesus Christ. God became a man. Jesus Christ is at once fully God and fully man. God took on mortal human flesh and became subject to all the things that every other mortal is subject to. He sneezed. He coughed. He got headaches and an upset stomach. Every morning he got up, shook the dust out of His hair, and served His Father faithfully. Jesus Christ was not only subject to sickness, but also to death. The eternal Son of God was die-able. In fact, he did die. And three days later, what was mortal became…
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Carl Trueman on Being a Christian Academic
Carl Trueman has an outstanding exhortation in the most recent issue of Themelios, and his remarks have a particular punch for academics: “The title ‘scholar’ is not one that you should ever apply to yourself, and its current profusion among the chatterati on the blogs is a sign of precisely the kind of arrogance and hubris against which we all need to guard ourselves. Call me old-fashioned, but to me the word ‘scholar’ has an honorific ring. It is something that others give to you when, and only when, you have made a consistent and outstanding contribution to a particular scholarly field (and, no, completion of a Ph.D. does not…
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Carl Trueman on “The Case for Gay Marriage”
Carl Trueman has responded briefly to last week’s Newsweek cover story by Lisa Miller, “The Case for Gay Marriage.” Trueman makes an excellent point about Miller’s article that is worth more than a moment’s reflection: “Behold the future. The piece is prophetic because, in a week where a high-ranking member of the NAE had to resign because he was `shifting’ on gay unions, at a time when the full weight of the opinion forming social media is behind the normalisation of homosexuality as acceptable, challenges such as this are clearly going to be coming thick and fast.
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Dan Wallace on the Reliability of the NT
I had the privilege of attending Dan Wallace’s riveting lecture at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) in November. It was an outstanding presentation, and it is now accessible to a wider audience. Dr. Wallace’s ETS lecture and another one that he has delivered at apologetics conferences are now available for purchase at a very reasonable price. Here are the two lectures and information about how to obtain the DVD recordings of them: