This morning I want to get a bit personal, which I don’t usually do on this blog, but this is something important and close to my heart. Many of my readers already know that my son James Webb (step-son for you people who get technical) passed away in 2004 after a five year battle with…
Christian Carnival CLVI has been posted at Parableman. It looks like a rich list again, and as I have for weeks and weeks and weeks, I hope to manage to post some responses, links, and comments to a number of these posts. Reality being what it is, however, I probably will do a miserable job…
Theodicy is a big subject, but for many people it relates closely to acceptance by Christians of the theory of evolution. I recall conversing with one friend who commented that while he could understand my acceptance of evolution, he just had a terribly hard time accepting a loving God who could, at the same time,…
I know, none of you readers believe I am capable of being brief, but I’m going to try! This post was triggered by my reading of Richard B. Hoppe’s post Dissent Out of Bounds on Uncommon Dissent (Oops, make that “Descent”), which is largely about Uncommon Descent’s comment censorship (because of which I do not…
In posting recently on translation I’ve noticed that many people connect one’s idea of inspiration with one’s approach to translation. The assumption seems to be that a person who believes in some form of verbal inspiration, especially verbal plenary inspiration, will necessarily favor a formal, word-by-word, or literal translaltion. Of these terms I prefer formal,…
When I took second year Greek, the grammar to use in getting beyond basic introductory material was Dana and Mantey’s Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament which is very hard to get. But as a replacement, and also a considerable improvement, we now have Daniel B. Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. For those…
Since I responsded to a post on principles of interpretation, and Bruce Alderman also weighed in on that topic, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for more interesting discussion. Today I found a couple of posts by way of a trackback to my threads blog, in which the author notes that he recommends my article…
One of the problems with having a sign in front of your church, and particularly a denominational identity, is that it produces certain expectations in people who may considering entering your property and visiting your church for an event or a worship service. Now some of you may not think this is a problem–you want…
Continuing my suggestions for maintaining Biblical languages skills, I want to discuss briefly the balance between fast reading and the more serious, detailed, grammatical study. Most students who make an effort to maintain their Biblical languages skill–and unfortunately small percentage in my experience–set out on each passage of scripture to study the text as though…
Rick Mansfield has made an excellent post on the controversy with the ESV. He makes a number of excellent points, but I’d like to quote one paragraph from near the end: My contention is not with the ESV. But I do have great problems with the inaccurate rhetoric that I often hear from proponents and…