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A discussion of my book When People Speak for God is taking place on the Compuserve Religion Forum. At the same time, Amazon.com has dropped the price to $12.23 ($17.99 suggested retail). I have also just written some notes on Justin Holcomb’s book Christian Theologies of Scripture over on my Participatory Bible Study blog. [...] The translator’s difficulty with this passage arises from the lack of a single English verb to express both “do right” and “be right with God”; of a noun that means both “righteousness” and “acceptance with God as righteous”; and of an adjective to describe the man who is both “righteous” and “accepted as [...] I’m adding another site to my blogroll, Transformed Daily. I got an e-mail from blogger Eric Jones on this one, thinking there might be some synergy, and after reading a bit, I think there is. A couple of entries that really caught my eye: ARE YOU A TRAINED FLEA CHRISTIAN OR ARE YOU A FREE FLEA CHRISTIAN? — this is really good. Read it and think about it! I Said the Prayer – Now Make Me Happy. This is an exceptionally good short piece on our reading. Now why would I, a Christian writer and publisher, promote a blog entry that talks about reading too many Christian books? I do so because Eric is absolutely right here. My experience as a Bible teacher (and my publishing started and still continues primarily in support of that ministry) has put me in contact with many, many Christians who are thinking about Bible study or playing around with it. But what they do primarily is read books about the Bible or books that they think go more directly to the answer. But there’s a reason Jesus spoke in parables, and there’s a reason why the treasure–knowledge of God–is not strewn over the surface. So if you’re going to buy that Christian book in place of studying your Bible, even if I’m the publisher or author, think twice. I expect to enjoy keeping track of Eric’s postings in the future. I think I first saw this thing about two cows several years ago, but there have been several more instances added in this version. Some of the new ones are even funnier than the earlier ones. It looks like people have just been tacking examples on the end. (HT: 42) A community must have some sort of definition in order to exist. This may seem fairly obvious, but often in discussions of religion we lose sight of that fact in efforts to be inclusive. It’s important to remember that there is a difference between saying somebody is a bad person and saying that they [...] Peter Kirk has a post, The personal relevance of the atonement, that expresses what I have been trying to say about the atonement much more precisely than I have managed to do it. I commend it strongly. At the same time, Adrian has posted again regarding a review of Pierced for Our Transgressions. Since I haven’t gotten hold of a copy of the book yet, I’m not going to comment on the review itself, but Adrian said one thing that has left me wondering. It is ironic that the more inclusive the evangelical movement in the UK aims to be – by including people who attack or minimize PSA the more they seem to exclude those who hold a more traditional evangelical position. I don’t call myself evangelical, but after talking to a few evangelicals from the UK I probably could. (I’m absolutely not going to fight over labels.) I’ve even encountered a few folks on this side of the pond who call themselves evangelical and appear to be even more liberal than I am. But even from my more liberal perspective I have no desire to exclude those who hold a “strong view” of PSA from any tent. They believe that God has provided redemption through Jesus Christ. I know of none of them who reject the incarnation. The feel I get from Adrian’s post is that if one doesn’t join in excluding the more liberal elements on this issue one must be excluding the more conservative. It would be a total denial of my view of the importance of non-essential doctrines (and I regard the specific metaphor used for atonement as a non-essential) for me to deny someone the one expression of the atonement that best brought the message of God’s reconciling grace home to them. I’m wondering if it’s really true that any evangelicals in the UK want to exclude advocates of PSA from their big tent. Could any of my UK readers help me with this? Every so often in wandering around the blogosphere I notice a blog that makes me say, “Why haven’t I noticed this before?” I found one today, The Christian Cynic, and I wanted to call attention to his post dealing with formal issues of an argument from ignorance. I think I’ll have fun keeping up [...] There has been some discussion amongst the science blogs about dealing with interview requests, in this case specifically for scientists. I had thought about saying something from my non-scientist perspective, but hadn’t really come up with anything. Then this morning, going through my Technorati favorites, I saw this story from Carl Zimmer. Now since [...] This story and video shows why Richardson really doesn’t understand how diplomacy actually works. He’s going to withdraw all the troops and then he’s going to go seriously into diplomacy. Let’s not make a mistake about this. When we withdraw from Iraq, we’re going to lose most of our ability to impact the country [...] Update: Or really, just a better reference. I think this story from MSNBC covers the ground better in a single article. I believe very strongly that we need to distinguish between radicals who want to kill us, and the very large number of Muslims who are peaceful people. But with the reaction to the [...] |
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