Next week I’ll be making my first ever visit to Louisville, KY and the campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Every other year, the council members of the Gospel Coalition gather for some kind of brainstorming/planning meeting. As I understand it, they discuss theology, ministry, culture, future plans for the Gospel Coalition, and pretty much anything else they want. And each council member can invite one other person to come along and observe. Jeff Louie, who teaches theology at our San Jose campus, is a council member, and he has asked me to come along this time. If you check out the list of council members, I think you can see why this should be a lot of fun.

The trip does come with two drawbacks:

Continue Reading…

Thanks to everyone who entered this week’s drawing to win a a copy of The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament from B&H Academic. As usual, there can only be one winner. And this week’s winner is:

Annette Peploe

Congratulations Annette! Send me an email with your contact information and I’ll get that shipped over to you.

Today is your last chance to enter your name for a chance to win a copy of The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament by Andreas Kostenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles Quarles (B&H Academic, 2009). I’ll be picking a winner tomorrow morning. So if you’d like to get in on this, head over to the giveaway and let me know.

It’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve done a book giveaway, so it’s time for another one. This time we’re giving away a copy of The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament by Andreas Kostenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles Quarles (B&H Academic). This looks like an outstanding resource for anyone wanting to dig into New Testament studies a bit more. So, if you’re interested, scroll down to see how to enter.

Here’s the information from the publisher:

Although Scripture cannot be reduced to a mere piece of human writing, there is much to gain by paying careful attention to the historical, literary, and theological dimensions of the biblical text. For this reason, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown is offered to the serious New Testament student who seeks to better understand and share God’s “word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). Across nearly one thousand pages, it thoroughly introduces all twenty-seven New Testament books and closely examines Christ’s incarnation and virgin birth, the heart of His ministry shown so vividly in the Gospels’ Passion Narratives, and the triumphant return of Jesus and our eternal reign with Him as depicted in Revelation. “Simply an outstanding work. Its up-to-date research alone makes The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown an invaluable resource. Add to this its comprehensive survey of the crucial issues related to New Testament studies, and you have a textbook well suited for the college or seminary classroom.” –Daniel L. Akin, president, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC. Continue Reading…

Good Reads

• The Top 5 Things Introverts Dread about Church: Awkward encounters are so much easier with caffeine and sugar.

• Forgive Us Our Student Debts: Who wants to study four years just so you can work a job the next 20 to pay for it? Student debt isn’t worth the price of freedom to follow God in your career, marriage, and family choices.

• How the Unrelenting Threat of Death Shapes Our Behavior: hundreds of published academic papers have shown that worrying about death affects everything from our prejudices and voting patterns to how likely we are to exercise or use sunscreen….People deal with death by upholding worldviews that are larger and longer-lasting than themselves, and opposing anyone or anything that violates these “cultural anxiety-buffers.”

• Defending the Bible Literally: ll these years later, I’m learning that understanding the literal meaning of the Bible is a more nuanced adventure than my college friends and I imagined. We’d been blithely unaware that there is more than one genre in the Bible, or that literary context profoundly matters to meaning.

Continue Reading…

I realized after writing that title that someone might think I’m announcing some major job transition. Nope. I am happily entrenched in sunny Portland, OR. But I am heading for Notre Dame this afternoon to spend several days at a philosophy of religion conference. The theme of the conference is “Minds, Bodies, and the Divine.” And here’s the description of what we’re supposed to be doing:

Various ancient religious/philosophical systems (Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and Stoicism) maintained that the divine mind ‘embodied’ itself in the world in much the same way in which immaterial souls are supposedly embodied in human organisms. Christianity has likewise traditionally endorsed a duality of mind and body, and maintains that, in becoming incarnate, the Son of God somehow took on both a human soul and a human body.

In the 20th and 21st centuries mind-body dualism has come under heavy fire; philosophers in the Christian tradition have begun to explore what implications contemporary materialism might have for their doctrines of incarnation and afterlife; and other philosophers have begun to explore naturalistic and materialistic variations on panentheism.

In this workshop, we bring together philosophers and theologians with interests in contemporary philosophy of mind to explore questions about the nature of embodiment and about the relations between minds (human and divine) and the material world.

You can read more about the conference and the papers being presented here. If you’re curious, I’ll be presenting a paper on Jonathan Edwards and how he viewed the human person. It’s a little too complicated to summarize quickly, but basically it focuses on summarizing Edwards’ understanding of “created reality,” how it relates to God’s existence, and what implications this has for how Edwards’ understands the human person. I know that’s not a terribly helpful description, but it’s the best I can do in one quick sentence.

And as usual when I attend a conference. I’ll try to post some highlights from the various sessions when I get back. So you can (hopefully) look forward to that sometime next week.

April was an interesting month around here as I was wrapping up a paper for a conference and finishing the semester here at the seminary. So the top five posts for April come mostly from quotes and videos I posted. But I’m glad you found them interesting.

The Top 5 Posts for April

• John Walton and Tremper Longman on Genesis 1-2
• C.S. Lewis on Why We Should Do (and read) the Things We Do
• A Prayer for Sunday (Thomas Aquinas)
• The Hardest Question in Theology
• Why Old Books Smell Like Old Books

This week’s book giveaway is a great book from Baker Academic: Jesus Among Friends and Enemies: A Historical and Literary Introduction to Jesus in the Gospels edited by Chris Keith and Larry Hurtado. This book takes a very different approach to introducing Jesus, looking at him through the lens of his friends (e.g. God, angels, disciples, family) and his enemies (e.g. Satan, demons, Jewish leaders, political authorities). So, if you’re in need of a good introduction to the life of Jesus, or if you’d just like one that does things a little differently, this should be a great book to check out. Scroll down to see how to enter.

Here’s some information from the publisher. You can also watch several videos from the authors over at Baker Academic.

This engaging text offers a fresh alternative to standard introductions to Jesus. Combining literary and sociohistorical approaches and offering a tightly integrated treatment, a team of highly respected scholars examines how Jesus’s friends and enemies respond to him in the Gospel narratives. It is the first book to introduce readers to the rich portraits of Jesus in the Gospels by surveying the characters who surround him in those texts–from John the Baptist, the disciples, and the family of Jesus to Satan, Pontius Pilate, and Judas Iscariot (among others).