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Monthly Archives: December 2014

A Prayer for the New Year

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by thecruciformpen in Prayers

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My wife just wrote a confession for the worship service at our church this Sunday. I was encouraged by her prayer for the new year and wanted to pass it along. May God hear this prayer and make all things new in 2015!

We come to you in this new year beaten and battered by the year just passed.

Help us to trust you to heal our wounds and use our sorrows.

We come to you in this new year eager to put you first in all we do.

Forgive us Lord for our failings of last year.

We come to you in this new year full of personal resolutions and self-centered goals.

Help us to trust you to make us more like your Son Jesus.

We come to you in this new year with small hopes and undersized expectations.

Forgive our faith for being so small.

We pray this in the name of the One who makes all things new, Amen.

The Incarnation and Limited Atonement

29 Monday Dec 2014

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Covenant Theology, James B. Torrance, Limited Atonement

I recently read an article by James B. Torrance titled “The Incarnation and ‘Limited RevProfJamesBTorranceAtonement'” [Evangelical Quarterly 55 (1983): 83-94]. Torrance takes a position against the doctrine of ‘limited atonement’ as he understands it. While I remain finally unpersuaded concerning his arguments against limited atonement, there was still a lot of good stuff in his article. Here are my two main take-aways: (1) He has an excellent discussion about the consequences of starting with the doctrine of the incarnation vs. the doctrine of election, and the divergent implications this starting point has for how we construct our doctrine of God. (2) Regarding historical theology there is a fascinating sketch of the emerging of “so-called ‘federal Calvinism’ or Covenant Theology which was to develop in England, Scotland, and Holland” (see pgs. 88-93).

Free $20 Gift for Logos Bible Software Books

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by thecruciformpen in Resources

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Discounts

Logos.com is giving a free $20 off for purchases until Dec 31. Use this discount code at checkout: FAITHLIFE-GIFT to save $20 on any single order.

I got the two following books for free because they were both under $20 on sale!

  • R. Norman Whybray’s Reading the Psalms as a Book
  • T. F. Torrance’s Space, Time and Incarnation  

reading-the-psalms-as-a-bookspace time incarnation

Satan: God’s Servant

18 Thursday Dec 2014

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Biblical Theology, Canon, Old Testament Theology, Satan, Sydney Page

Satan

Sydney Page has a fascinating article about Satan [“Satan: God’s Servant.” Journal Of The Evangelical Theological Society 50.3 (2007): 449-465]. More specifically, it is about the biblical portrayal of the Satan figure. More often than  not, our thinking about angelic beings and mysterious figures like Satan is shaped more by popular imagination, movies, and artwork (like William Blake’s historical piece above). Page has gifted the church with a sound biblical basis for thinking about Satan.

In the article he studies the story of Job (and Satan’s role in the Job account). He demonstrates convincingly how “the Joban conception of Satan exercised significant influence on the rest of the biblical canon…how Satan is portrayed as a servant of God in Job, then…how later biblical texts pick up and use the Joban ideas” (449). Here is a great example how later biblical texts can echo earlier ones. And conversely, how earlier biblical texts can affect later ones. (Similar to Richard B. Hays’ project on the Gospels and also Paul)

The motif that Page finds recurring in various forms in the developing biblical tradition around the Satan figure has to do with Satan’s inimical subordination to God: “Although there is incontrovertible evidence of change and development in the concept of Satan in the biblical literature, this basic notion that Satan is under divine control appears repeatedly” (465). This has significant implications for our doctrine of God and the age old questions of theodicy.

One of the take-aways from the article relates to how we speak about Satan: “One must, therefore, be careful to avoid exaggerating the power of Satan and setting up a dichotomy between God and Satan that would suggest a particular action must be attributed to either one or the other. These alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Satan is God’s adversary, but whatever he does falls under the overarching sovereignty of God” (465).

Lectures by Richard B. Hays

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Biblical Theology, Gospels, Lectures, Richard B. Hays

043910_hays_richard_hirez

A friend of mine pointed me to the following lectures by Richard B. Hays. If you are considering buying his newest book Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness these lectures cover the same material:

  1. Can the Gospels Teach Us How to Read the Old Testament?
  2. Torah Reconfigured: Reading Scripture with Matthew
  3. Turning the World Upside Down: Reading Scripture with Luke
  4. The Temple of His Body: Reading Scripture with John
  5. Opening Our Minds to Understand the Scriptures

Here is a quote from his Reading Backwards (page 4) that summarizes nicely is thesis in these lectures:

I want to suggest to you that we learn to read Scripture rightly only if our minds and imaginations are opened by seeing the scriptural text–and therefore the world–through the Evangelists’ eyes. In order to explore that hermeneutical possibility, we must give close consideration to the revisionary figural ways that the four Gospel writers actually read Israel’s Scripture…Here is a preliminary preview of what we will find as we pursue our exploration: the Gospels teach us how to read the OT, and–as the same time–the OT teaches us how to read the Gospels. Or, to put it a little differently, we learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and–at the same time–we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT.

Learning How to Read Backwards…

14 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thecruciformpen in People to Know

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Richard B. Hays

I just received Richard B. Hays’ new book, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. 

reading backwards

The book is basically what he delivered as the Hulsean Lectures in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University 2013-2014. Excited to read it! Review to come soon!

I am thankful for William Tyndale

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

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English Versions, William Tyndale

William_Tyndale

It is hard to overstate the significance of the work of William Tyndale in translating the Bile into English for the first time from Greek and Hebrew. In my opinion, the best biography out there on him is by David Daniell and it focuses on Tyndale as a translator. I highly recommend it!

In the introduction to his biography David Daniell writes the following:

William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages assembled by King James to prepare the Authorized Version of 1611, so often praised for unlikely inspiration, took over Tyndale’s work. Nine-tenths of the Authorized Version’s New Testament is Tyndale’s. The same is true of the first half of the Old Testament, which is as far as he was able to get before he was executed outside Brussels in 1536

English phrases from Scripture for which we have Tyndale to thank (i.e., phrases which he coined and that went through to the Authorized Version and became deeply embedded within the English language):

  • ‘And they heard the voice of the Lord God as he walked in the garden in the cool of the day’ (Genesis)  [Daniell 3]
  • ‘God forbid’ (Paul’s μὴ γένοιτο in Romans) [Daniell 141]
  • ‘And all that heard it wondered, at those things which were told them of the shepherds. But Mary kept all those sayings, and pondered them in her heart’ (Luke 2) [Daniell 135]
  • ‘Finally, my brethren be strong in the Lord, and the power of his might’ (Ephesians 6) [Daniell 139]
  • ‘The signs of the times,’
  • ‘the spirit is willing,’
  • ‘Live and move and have our being,’
  • ‘fight the good fight’ [Daniell 142]
  • ‘the salt of the earth,’
  • ‘let there be light,’
  • ‘this thy brother was dead, and is alive again: and was lost and is found’
  • ‘there were shepherds abiding in the field’ [Daniell 1]

Tyndale invented some words that have remained in English usage till this day (‘scapegoat’  for example). But perhaps some of his most earthshaking work as a translator was not in inventing new words, but in providing new translations of old words.

Here are some significant and load-bearing words (i.e., words that carried a lot of freight in the pre-reformation church) and how Tyndale translated them:

  • πρεσβύτερος- ‘senior’ / ‘elder’ NOT ‘priest’
  • ἐκκλησία- ‘congregation’ NOT ‘church’
  • μετανοέω- ‘repent’ NOT ‘do penance’
  • ἐξομολογέω- ‘acknowledge’ NOT ‘confess’
  • ἀγάπη- ‘love’ NOT ‘charity’

It is hard to appreciate the revolutionary and subversive nature of these particular words translated this way because we do not live under the immense burden of the mediaeval church. Tyndale’s choice in translating these words avoided the weighty connotations of words like ‘priest,’ ‘church,’ ‘do penance,’ ‘confess,’ and ‘charity.’ As David Daniell says, “he is making the New Testament refer inwardly to itself, as he instructs his readers to do, and not outwardly to the enormous secondary construction of late-mediaeval practices of the Church: priests and penance and confession and charity…He cannot possibly have been unaware that those words in particular undercut the entire sacramental structure of the thousand-year Church throughout Europe, Asia, and north Africa” [148-149].

I thank God for men like William Tyndale.

B. B. Warfield Website

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

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B.B. Warfield, Bibliography

I just stumbled upon a website dedicated to The Life and Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. There should definitely be more websites like this one. Hats off to whoever took the time to create it.

The cool thing is that it has a great bibliography on Warfield and lists all of his published and unpublished works (e.g., books, booklets, articles, sermons and addresses)!

warfield

Two Important Works on Emotions

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

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B.B. Warfield, Emotions, Gerald Peterman

In 2013, Gerald W. Peterman wrote a book called Joy and Tears. The subtitle of the book,The Emotional Life of The Christian, is suggestive in light of another work on a similar topic. B. B. Warfield once wrote an excellent essay titled “On The Emotional Life of Our Lord” in which he articulates a conception of the emotional life of Jesus grounded on the specific emotions ascribed to him in the gospel narratives. Warfield’s essay sought to bring clarity to the church’s conception of the emotions of Jesus; in the samejoy-and-tears-cover way, Peterman’s book brings great clarity to how we think about our own emotions in light of the emotions of Jesus. The two works really belong together on multiple levels. The latter is a corollary of the former. Actually, it seems as though Peterman’s book functions as a sequel to / continuation of Warfield’s study.

  • Warfield’s essay was published as a chapter in Biblical and Theological Studies and is available on Amazon and also Logos Bible Software.
  • Joy and Tears is available on Amazon. Below is a short review of what’s inside.

Peterman has taken a topic that is notoriously difficult to understand and made it accessible for the rest of us. The book is filled with incredibly insightful explanations. In almost every chapter I experienced an aha moment. The book has a very personal feel to it. A book on emotions would be very hard to plow through for the average reader if it were overly academic and scholastic. But Peterman has done a great job of keeping close to the needs of the averagereader. He addresses issues and questions that we are actually asking (as opposed to theoretical speculation)! And most importantly (for me anyway) he gives plenty of examples and illustrations, often from his own life. This was extremely helpful for thinking of specific manifestations of otherwise abstract ideas. For example, when I began each chapter discussing the various emotions I expected to skim through them quickly, thinking myself to be relatively “neutral” on most of them. But   Peterman’s examples helped me to realize just how many ways they manifest themselves. The book is thoroughly biblical, constantly directing our thoughts to Scripture to guide us in our thinking about emotions. This is important because there are many popular misconceptions about emotions (and Peterman goes to Scripture to correct them!). Particularly fascinating and insightful is the idea that Jesus’ display of emotions was sinless and therefore it’s a good thing for us to imitate them (e.g., joy, anger, grief, sadness, etc.). I only have one minor critique of the book: the suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter are surprisingly small. I would’ve loved to have more suggestions to dig deeper.

On Controlling Our Borders

05 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by thecruciformpen in Prayers

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Immigration, prayers, Walter Brueggemann

There is a lot on the news about immigration reform lately. So I thought this prayer from Walter Brueggemann, On Controlling Our Borders, was fitting (and challenging):

Jesus–crucified and risen–draws us into his presence again, 

The one who had nowhere to lay his head,
no safe place,
no secure home,
no passport or visa,
no certified citizenship. 
We gather around him in our safety, security, and well-being, and fret about “illegal immigrants”.
We fret because they are not like us and refuse our language. We worry that there are so many of them and there crossings do not stop. We are unsettled because it is our tax dollars that sustain them and provide services. We feel the hype about closing borders and heavy fines, because we imagine that our life is under threat.
And yet, as you know very well, we, all of us–early or late–are immigrants from elsewhere;
we are glad for cheap labor and seasonal workers to do tomatoes and apples and oranges to our savoring delight. And beyond that, even while we are beset by fears and aware of pragmatic costs, we know very well that you are the God who welcomes strangers, who loves aliens and protects sojourners. 
As always, we feel the tension in the slippage between the deeper truth of our faith and the easier settlements of our society.
You do not ask for an easy way out, but for courage and honesty and faithfulness. Give us ease in the presence of those unlike us; give us generosity amid demands of those in need, help us to honor those who trespass as you forgive our trespasses.
You are the God of all forgiveness. By your gracious forgiveness transpose us into agents of your will, that our habits and inclinations may more closely follow your majestic lead, that our lives may joyously conform to your vision of the new world. 
We pray in the name of your holy Son, even Jesus.
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