This is the third article in a series that discusses that tendency Christians have to put God in a box. In the first article (link) we saw that we tend to feel insecure about God unless we have contained Him within a box in our minds and then saw that God has revealed Himself to…
A couple of years ago I got thinking about the idea of putting God in a box. This is a charge people often level at conservative Christians and Reformed folk in particular. It is not unusual for us to hear that we seem to feel that we have got God figured out, stuffed and mounted…
There are some books I can read in an evening or two and feel like I have a good grasp of what the book is all about. There are others that I can pour over hour after hour and still feel like I am only scratching the surface of the book. Evangelical Hermeneutics falls into…
There is a sense in which this blog is, for lack of a better word, living or dynamic. What I mean is that I sometimes write articles and return to them a year or two later and post them again, but only after refining them. As my understanding of various topics increases, I find myself…
At long last, the ESV Reverse Interlinear New Testament has become available. What is a Reverse Interlinear Bible, you ask? The Preface answers well. “A conventional interlinear New Testament provides an English translation directly below each Greek word in a Greek New Testament. This tool is called an interlinear because the English words are placed…
You know, I really don’t know how I missed this one. I guess I just don’t get out to the movies enough (or don’t pay close enough attention to what’s new and upcoming in the theatres). Apparently, in December of this year, New Line Cinema will be releasing The Nativity Story, a film chronicling, well,…
The Gospel of Judas has had its fifteen minutes of fame. It is but another in an endlessly long line of stories or documents meant to shake the foundations of the Christian faith. Like its many predecessors, it gave National Geographic and anti-Christian authors an opportunity to voice their dissension with the biblical story of…
The Da Vinci Code, until recently the talk of the Christian world, seems to have rapidly become yesterday’s news. Though the book continues to sell and the film continues to draw, Christians seem to have lost interest. That is often the way things are in the church these days. Christians seems to react quickly and…
The Pocket Guide to the Bible is, according to the subtitle, “a little book about the big book.” It is the third in a series of pocket guides written by Jason Boyett, the first two being The Pocket Guide to Adulthood and The Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse (my review). Like its predecessors, this is…
Bart Ehrman is a highly-regarded New Testament scholar and chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has both an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary where he studied under Bruce Metzger. Much of Ehrman’s career has been dedicated to proving a rather unorthodox thesis: that…
Eugene Peterson believes that the way we read the Bible is as important as the very fact that we read the Bible. “Do we read the Bible for information about God and salvation, for principles and ‘truths’ that we can use to live better? Or do we read it in order to listen to God…
Time magazine got it right, “For those who choke too easily on God and his rules…angels are the handy compromise, all fluff and meringue, kind, nonjudgemental. They are available to everyone, like aspirin. Only in the New Age would it be possible to invent an angel so mellow that it can be ignored.” My local…
Over the past few days, I have been reading J.P. Moreland’s book, Love Your God With All Your Mind. It is a good book; deeply challenging. Moreland says many of the same things Nancy Pearecy did several years later in the much-lauded Total Truth. Like Pearcey, Moreland is concerned with the intellectual environment within Evangelicalism,…
I do believe that this will be the last book I read, at least for the next little while, on the subject of Bible translations. This is not to say that it is a bad book, nor is it to say that it is the final word on the subject. Rather, I have read several…
One of Satan’s greatest triumphs must surely be in convincing Christians to abandon the Bible, or at least keeping them from really mining its depths. He tries to convince us that the Bible is outdated, unimportant or less important than many other things. He tries to convince us that it is difficult to understand and…
Richard Mayhue is Dean of Studies at the Master’s Seminary and has sufficient credibility to write a volume about how to properly interpret the Bible. Writing in a simple and straightforward manner, he describes the process of “cutting it straight,” a term he borrows from Paul’s message to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:15. Though the…
Choosing a Bible used to be an easy task. Only a few decades ago there were only two or three translations to choose from, giving a person very little in the way of options. The situation today is far different. We are inundated with translations of Scripture and it seems that a major new translation…
Translating Truth is a collection of essays on the subject of Bible translation written by leading Evangelical scholars. The essays were first presented as papers at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in November 2004. The publishers notes that “the purpose of publishing these papers now as a collection is to encourage the…
Seeing John MacArthur on Larry King Live tonight reminded me that the very first book review I ever wrote for this site (and to post at Amazon) was for his book Battle for the Beginning. I still count it as one of my favorite MacArthur books. It was a formative influence in my belief in…
The authority of Scripture is, as this book indicates, a critical issue for the body of Christ. Much of the ground that was gained during the Protestant Reformation has been lost in the past few decades. There has been a dramatic shift among Protestants away from biblical authority. James Draper and Kenneth Keathley, both Southern…