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This text courtesy of Logos’ promotional department:

Logos Bible Software is celebrating the launch of their new online Bible by giving away 72 ultra-premium print Bibles at a rate of 12 per month for six months. The Bible giveaway is being held at Bible.Logos.com and you can get up to five different entries each month! After you enter, be sure to check out Logos and see how it can revolutionize your Bible study.

As I said on the Logos blog, Logos may never win my heart away from BibleWorks, but it won my wallet a long time ago.

Andy Crouch’s Culture-Making has yielded some treasures of insight, helping me make something of my cultural and physical world (”making something of the world,” in both of its possible senses, is his helpful definition of “culture”). But I have to disagree with his take on the historicity of the Genesis accounts.

American evangelicalism’s hunger for cultural acceptance—a hunger Crouch rightly criticizes elsewhere in this book—has left it terribly vulnerable to the power of prevailing cultural presuppositions. Biological macro-evolution is one of those presuppositions, and its pressure has produced one small, awkward chapter—an “interlude,” Crouch calls it—which calls the Bible into question. Here’s an excerpt:

I am not sure the biblical writers would have been terribly troubled by the failings of Genesis 1–11 as literal cosmological history…. [Genesis 1–11] are less a finely documented history than a story that invites our trust…. If there is some way, in the new heavens and new earth, to have access to the whole story of this wonderful broken universe, I will not be surprised if I find that the biblical authors missed some of the details about how God created the universe and the human race. But I am confident I will not feel in any way deceived by them—indeed, I believe I will be unspeakably grateful that, prompted by the Holy Spirit, they told stories that made the best possible sense of the world.” (118, 120)

A faithful reading of the early chapters of Genesis—and of the other portions of Scripture which regularly rely on them—simply does not allow for Crouch’s view. I side rather with Crouch’s insight from this very interlude: “The most important things in our life are learned by trust, not by deduction from experiment.” (120) The vast majority of macro-evolution’s adherents have never done a serious study of the evidence. Neither have I. Most of us will never have that capacity. What little we could manage would fall far short of scientific rigor. Instead we all choose what we consider to be a reliable authority—or that Authority chooses us!

I don’t deny that the facts support my case, only that anyone can come to the facts without prior faith commitments that will exercise some considerable influence over what the facts will say.

Andy Crouch’s Culture-Making reminds us that we are all culturally located, whether we realize it or not:

In many American supermarkets you can still find an “ethnic food” aisle—as if only some kinds of food participate in a particular cultural tradition. Nonsense—all food is “ethnic.” (p. 41)

Crouch’s book has offered many similar insights in its first 100 pages, though I’ll withhold further analysis until I can read the whole thing.

Serious comments only, please.

I want to ask you to think and think hard about what Jonathan Edwards is saying in the following excerpt. If my experience (and, I recently found out, that of Tim Keller) is any guide, you’re going to have a hard time understanding him because he’s using a psychological paradigm you’ve never considered. You may have never even thought that you had a psychological paradigm. But I have been thinking increasingly that Edwards is shaped by the Bible in this area—and we by the Enlightenment. What do you think? I’m especially interested in anyone who can give me a good bibliographic pointer to someone discussing this Edwardsean assertion, coming from his classic work, Religious Affections (pp. 96-97):

I. It may be inquired, what the affections of the mind are?

I answer, the affections are no other, than the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul.

God has indued the soul with two faculties: one is that by which it is capable of perception and speculation, or by which it discerns and views and judges of things; which is called the understanding. The other faculty is that by which the soul does not merely perceive and view things, but is some way inclined with respect to the things it views or considers; either is inclined to ‘em, or is discinclined, and averse from ‘em; or is the faculty by which the soul does not behold things, as an indifferent unaffected spectator, but either as liking or disliking, pleased or displeased, approving or rejecting. This faculty is called by various names: it is sometimes called the inclination: and, as it has respect to the actions that are determined and governed by it, is called the will: and the mind, with regard to the exercises of this faculty, is often called the heart.

The exercises of this faculty are of two sorts; either those by which the soul is carried out towards the things that are in view, in approving of them, being pleased with them, and inclined to them; or those in which the soul opposes the things that are in view, in disapproving them, and in being displeased with them, averse from them, and rejecting them.

And as the exercises of the inclination and will of the soul are various in their kinds, so they are much more various in their degrees. There are some exercises of pleasedness or displeasedness, inclination or disinclination, wherein the soul is carried but a little beyond a state of perfect indifference. And there are other degrees above this, wherein the approbation or dislike, pleasedness or aversion, are stronger; wherein we may rise higher and higher, till the soul comes to act vigorously and sensibly, and the actings of the soul are with that strength that (through the laws of the union which the Creator has fixed between soul and body) the motion of the blood and animal spirits begins to be sensibly altered; whence oftentimes arises some bodily sensation, especially about the heart and vitals, that are the fountain of the fluids of the body: from whence it comes to pass, that the mind, with regard to the exercises of this faculty, perhaps in all nations and ages, is called the heart. And it is to be noted, that they are these more vigorous and sensible exercises of this faculty, that are called the affections.

The will, and the affections of the soul, are not two faculties; the affections are not essentially distinct from the will, nor do they differ from the mere actings of the will and inclination of the soul, but only in the liveliness and sensibleness of exercise.

A little tip: the paradigm Edwards is casting off is that which divides the human person into separate faculties called mind, will, and emotion.

I upgraded to the new iPod Touch 3.0 software. $10 well spent. Here’s why:

• Copy and Paste. I’ve been needing it for all sorts of things, from sermon notes to quick e-mails to friends sharing a little web content. It works intuitively well, like all Apple GUI features.
• Spotlight. A needed improvement, and so easy to access.
• Search Mail. A much-needed improvement. I love my iPod Touch as an e-mail device.
• Notes Syncing. A little annoying that I have to use Apple Mail in OS X (a great program, but not as good as Gmail for my needs) for this.
• And the pièce de résistance, Turn-by-Turn Directions. Just load them before you go and they stay in the cache, complete with self-zooming maps for every step and simple click-the-arrow-for-the-next-turn instructions. My beautiful navigatrix loves it. It’s now hard to get the Touch out of her hands during a trip. But take my advice and have your navigatrix look a few turns ahead every time she tells you what to do next. Google Maps is not infallible.

The iPod Touch gets better all the time as more developers write—and then improve, for free—great software for it. I use it mostly for e-mail and Google Reader, but it’s also my alarm clock, my morning NPR streamer, my sermon-notes taker, and a handy device for the hard-to-redeem snatches of reading time a busy guy gets. I’ve rarely made a better purchase—especially considering that I got it for free with my iMac! But you simply must have a wireless network if you want to make good use of it.

Here’s another little helpful and challenging quote I read in Total Church.

At present the military and economic might of Western nations is struggling to counter the threat of international terrorism. It is proving difficult to defeat an enemy made up of local cells working toward a common vision with high autonomy but shared values (p. 109)

The parallel should be obvious. The problem with the Christian church is that it doesn’t exactly have shared values. May God by His grace and for His great glory change our sad state of affairs!

I found this little excerpt from Total Church to be a challenging source of wisdom. May God help me to apply these insights. I’m not sure I have good answers to all these questions.

We sometimes ask people to imagine they are part of a church-planting team in a cross-cultural situation in some other part of the world:

• What criteria would you use to decide where to live?
• How would you approach secular employment?
• What standard of living would you expect as pioneer missionaries?
• What would you spend your time doing?
• What opportunities would you be looking for?
• What would your prayers be like?
• What would you be trying to do with your new friends?
• What kind of team would you want around you?
• How would you conduct your meetings together?

We find it easier to be radical in our thinking when we transplant ourselves outside our current situation. But we are as much missionaries here and now as we would be if we were part of a cross-cultural team in another part of the world. Mission is central to us wherever we are. These are the kinds of questions we should be asking wherever we are. (p. 33)

Wow!

No doubt businesses will arise that will do what this guy did for a fee. I don’t think I could get away with it, and I’m not yet sure I would want to.

I’d like to hear what the guy has to say after reading Technopoly and after a few years of experience. I don’t mean that as a challenge; I’d really like to hear his thoughts.

Ἀγάπη (agape) love is often said to be an action given independent of the worth of the person loved.

But if you follow the exegetical data, it’s more like “faith,” which all recognize is worth only as much as its object.

Hope is the same.

A thought-provoking article excerpted on the blog of a missionary I respect and love.

Logos’ revamped survey is asking users if they have Kindles. That can only mean that they’re thinking of opening up a way for Logos content to be used on portable reading devices, something I’ve been pestering Phil Gons about for a while!

Despite respected naysayers, I love my Kindle. I’m reading several books and articles on it right now, all but one of which were free:

• Jane Eyre
• A Lover’s Quarrel with the Evangelical Church
• Open Letter to Google
• A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love
• The Life of God in the Soul of Man
• Religious Affections

Take the Logos survey here.

A friend and fellow iPod Touch owner sent me Tim Challies’ “Don’t Take Your iPod to Church” a few days ago and asked me what I thought.

It just so happens that I do take my iPod Touch to church and take voluminous sermon notes on it, but that friend made some good points spurred by Challies’ post:

1. iPod instead of Bible feels less formal/deliberate to me.
2. iPod seems like it could be a distraction to others around me.
3. I can’t take notes as well on an iPod.
4. iPod gives me a feeling of “get where I’m going in a hurry” convenience.

I thought he answered well two questions that Neil Postman has now gotten me asking: First, what is the unspoken ideology that every technology carries with it? The medium, after all, is a message. Second, we techie folks know what tech gives, but what does it take away?

But I’m still carrying my iPod to church, and here’s why I do: I have found that the iPod gives such benefits that I am willing to put up with what it taketh away. I know I’ll use the sermon notes I take by putting them into BibleWorks—and I know paper notes will end up in the trash. So while I’m taking notes on the Touch I constantly keep two goals in mind which help me keep control of the technology: 1) understanding this passage by distilling Pastor’s exegetical points and 2) enriching my future teaching of the Bible.

I also try to communicate to others around me with my body language that I am listening intently and not texting. I have to think they would conclude that a guy like me would not so brazenly text during an entire message! Being married is actually a help, because people know that a married woman would be too embarrassed that her husband was texting to let it continue very long.

I can’t say, however, that I have control of all other technologies I use and that they never distract me. Google Reader, especially, is one that I am still fighting to get control of. My subtext for this post is that tech users should not reflexively defend their gadgets but should ask those trenchant Postman questions above.

Ever since I read this line a few weeks ago from my favorite tech reviewer, David Pogue, it has struck me as the solution to the Mac vs. PC debate:

There are two kinds of people: those who value elegance, simplicity and beauty, and those who don’t. You’ll never convince either group to change their minds; it’s like a religious war.

[From NYTimes.com]

Aesthetics is for me indeed a religious category, because God made beauty and the capacity to enjoy it. (Note: I am not saying that PC users are ungodly, only not as far along in progressive sanctification! =)

Some months ago, my wife and I watched the fascinating PBS documentary mentioned in this fascinating article, and now there’s a fascinating, never-before-seen, addition to the story.

On this twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, take Solomon’s advice and visit the house of mourning by following those links.

Do not tell anyone that I read an article by Ann Coulter in WorldNetDaily. Pretend that this is from a responsible writer and news source. (I’m not even going to link to it!) But the figures, I would have to think, are accurate. And the issue is important: a major theme in Scripture is God’s tendency to take the side of the oppressed.

In a country with approximately 150 million pro-lifers, five abortionists have been killed since Roe v. Wade.

In that same 36 years, more than 49 million babies have been killed by abortionists. Let’s recap that halftime score, sports fans: 49 million to five.

A responsible adult with a good head on his shoulders and a year in twitterverse under his belt offers “Ten Reasons Why I Use Twitter.” Here’s one:

3. Information. Twitter offers a wealth of incredible information. If I want to find out about a topic of interest, I enter the topic in the search and I receive more information from fellow tweeters than I could ever use. Most of the tweets have great links that guide me to even more information.

Read the rest…

Usage, ah, Usage… What a fickle goddess! No hobgoblin of little minds are you!

At the end of blog posts for the last few years (notably those of JT), bloggers have been including “Hat Tips,” little acknowledgments to other bloggers who have supplied the author with a good link. Something like this:

HT: John Doe

A “hat tip,” of course, is a metaphor for acknowledgment. “HT: John Doe” means “I tip my hat to John Doe (for bringing this link to my attention).”

But, O Usage! What hast thou done? I just got an e-mail from a friend to whom I’d sent a link:

“I will try it! Thanks for the HT.”

Do you see what has happened? “HT” has taken on the meaning of “a tip, especially a worthwhile Internet link.” That meaning fits blog posts just fine, but it’s not the original intent of the metaphor. At this point I hesitate to call my friend’s usage of “HT” a malapropism because it struck me as quite natural. “HT,” a brand new coinage, is already shifting its meaning. Fascinating.

Nicholas Kristof is one of my favorite liberals. I would love to win one of his trips! Here’s just a little bit of his good advice to world travelers:

2. Carry cash and your passport where no robber will find it. Assuming that few bandits read this column, I’ll disclose that I carry mine in a pouch that loops onto my belt and tucks under my trousers.

Read the whole thing…

“The Shack” (William P. Young)

The Shack has taken America by storm, and like most storms it has kicked up a good bit of controversial dust along the way. I recently reviewed it in order to get a free copy.

Mackenzie Alan Phillips is the central character in The Shack. His young daughter, Missy, was murdered by a serial killer, and over the years the resulting Great Sadness has almost incapacitated him. He’s a Christian. A seminary graduate, in fact. But while his wife seems to have been able to find comfort in God, “Mack” has not yet been able to forgive God for letting Missy be murdered.

So God meets Mack at the Shack, the place where Missy died. Only God is not one but three: “Papa,” a jovial black woman; Jesus, a large-nosed Jewish carpenter; and “Sarayu,” a colorful apparition in the basic shape of an Asian woman. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Papa explains to Mack that he has taken the shape that will bring the most comfort to Mack. Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu lead Mack through various experiences and conversations which free him to forgive his daughter’s killer and restore his love for God.

Several good things can be said about this book: It pictures the deep mutual love among the persons of the Trinity, and it stresses man’s need to live dependent on God.

Hmm. That was fast. But I meant it.

However, a few significant problems exist, too:

• Putting words in God’s mouth is a dangerous thing.
• God tells Mack, “I don’t need to punish people for sin. Sin is it’s own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It’s not my purpose to punish it; it’s my joy to cure it.” (120)
• The book despises hierarchy—both among the godhead and among humans. Jesus tells Mack that the persons of the Trinity are submitted to one another in the same way they are submitted to Mack.
• Papa sometimes speaks irreverently or even slightly scatalogically.
• The reason given for God representing himself in Scripture as male is said to be that good fathering would be far more lacking on earth than good mothering, and God wanted to pick up the slack.
• The book has a barely disguised disdain for religion (and seminary education!). The church has little or no place in the book.
• Sarayu suggests that it’s not a “fatal” mistake to view Eden as a myth. (134)
• Jesus leaves it a bit unclear as to how He regards world religions. (182)
• To borrow explicitly from John Piper (who gets it, as usual, from Jonathan Edwards): God’s love for man is seen in His making much of man rather than freeing man to make much of God. (190)
• God is awfully soft on sin. Papa says, “I don’t do…guilt or condemnation.” (223) Mack’s sinful heart is a wild wonderful mess rather than an object of divine wrath.

Perhaps the most significant problem in the book is the way that it deals with the most significant problem in Christian theology, the problem of evil. Man’s choice is sacrosanct in The Shack. Over and over—ad nauseam—God insists He will not violate man’s choice. But this leads the god of The Shack to say exactly the opposite of what the God of Scripture has said. Papa explains, “I did not purpose Missy’s death, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it for good.” (222) This is striking because it so closely matches—and explicitly contradicts—what Joseph told his brothers in Genesis 50:20, “You planned this for evil, but God planned it for good.” Another phrase in the book is quite similar. Papa tells Mack, “Just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies.” (185) But God said through the prophet Amos, “Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?” Absolving God of responsibility for evil by making him purposefully impotent to stop it—shackled by the inviolability of man’s self-determining choice—is not the Bible’s way.

The book is meant to be a comfort to hurting people who cannot accept God’s love. But Mack’s question toward the beginning of the book stands unanswered: “I just can’t imagine any final outcome that would justify all this.” (127)

The Bible does offer comfort to hurting people, but that comfort extends from the powerful hands of a God who “does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.” These words come from the most powerful world ruler of his day, Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4:35). And he continues: “None can stay” those powerful hands or even say to God, “What have you done?” Far from being opposed to hierarchy, Jesus said, “All authority on heaven and in earth is given to me” (Mt 28:19). His benevolent rule will bring all human history to a final outcome which will justify all the pain of human existence.

For a more lengthy scriptural case for this view, check out this excellent article or this excellent book.

I’m writing a blog post about a blog post about an Internet article about the use of the Internet.

So here goes.

Click here for Alan Jacobs‘ comments on this New York Magazine article. Jacobs is a bit of a Christian Neil Postman sometimes. He helps me, anyway, look at my technological life with wiser eyes. (But he writes everything in BBEdit, which makes him part of the problem, not the solution! =)

Kevin Bauder of Central Seminary is always worth hearing. And this blog hears him. It’s my firm desire that this blog never be what he describes in the last line of the following paragraph of this excellent, timely essay:

These young [fundamentalist] leaders are aware of the injustices of the past, and consequently they are very much on their guard against the imperfections of the present. When they perceive anything that looks like the old imperialism, they tend to react strongly. Given the availability of electronic communication, their reactions can be propagated widely and quickly. Sometimes, these reactions are poorly considered. Obsessed with issues and episodes, they run the risk of becoming as pugilistic as the very leaders to whom they object.

I’ve spent much of the last two weeks trying to process and organize the usage data for ἀγάπη/ἀγαπάω (and, to a lesser extent, φιλέω) in the Greek New Testament, the Septuagint, Josephus, and even the Apostolic Fathers (thank you, BibleWorks!). (Ok, Logos was a help, too, especially in reading Josephus in long form to get context.)

I’m going to present that material to you, and if you think you see a hole, feel free to point it out!

First, I’ll cover usage data which I consider helpful for overturning the common view that ἀγάπη is always and only a special Christian love.

1. ἀγάπη is used for illicit love. In those uses it is clearly an “action” lost people are capable of performing.

• a) Lk 11:42–43 “Woe to the Pharisees who neglect the love of God but who love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces!” (cf. Mat 6:5, which uses φιλέω for almost the same situation.)
• b) Lk 16:13 “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (Christ raises the possibility of having “ἀγάπη love” for money.)
• c) 1 Jn 2:15 “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
• d) Jn 3:19 “People loved the darkness rather than the light.”
• e) 2 Tim 4:10 “Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me.”
• f) 2 Pet 2:15 “They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing.”

I consider a) and c)—as well as a) in number 2 below—particularly instructive, because Scripture uses the same word in the same context with no apparent shift in meaning.

2. ἀγάπη, when it is used for a laudable love, can be used for a love which is merely natural and not at all Christian. Here again, it is a love lost people are capable of performing.

• a) Mt 5:43–48 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?”
• b) Lk 7:36–50 “When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
• c) 1 Pet 2:10 “Whoever desires to love (ὁ θέλων ζωὴν ἀγαπᾶν) life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil.”
• d) Ant 2:9 “Jacob…loved (ἠγάπα) [Joseph] above the rest of his sons, both because of the beauty of his body, and the virtues of his mind, for he excelled the rest in prudence.”

Westminster Theological Seminary has put together a response to Dan Brown’s book—now Ron Howard’s movie—Angels and Demons. Check it out.

A little tip for word study in the Bible: Don’t think that you have exhausted the topic of “love” when you have looked up and studied every passage in which “love” appears—or even every passage in which forms of ἀγαπάω or φιλέω appear.

No one word, Greek or English, communicates the Bible’s ethic of love. Sentences and whole paragraphs and arguments and sections communicate that ethic.

For example, if you tried to do an exhaustive study of love in the NT and you did so by looking up ἀγαπάω and φιλέω, you’d miss the story of the Good Samaritan. Clearly the Samaritan loved his neighbor, but the word “love” never occurs in the story.

When you do a topical study, try to find all the passages that teach on the topic. Word searches will certainly help, but they aren’t enough.

My blog is now available for the Kindle.

I do truly enjoy my Kindle. It has been for me a real gift from the Father of Lights.

Stanley Fish has a larger share of common grace than most people. For all his dark glasses, he sees many things clearly, and I always enjoy reading him. This must-read article made me feel truly sad—and not in a condescending way at all—for the hundreds of thousands of NY Times readers who continue to live so blindly in the faith that they have no faith. Reason is an idol of Enlightenment culture (as well as a gift of God).

Here are three quick excerpts that grabbed me from Fish’s piece:

There is no such thing as “common observation” or simply reporting the facts. To be sure, there is observation and observation can indeed serve to support or challenge hypotheses. But the act of observing can itself only take place within hypotheses (about the way the world is) that cannot be observation’s objects because it is within them that observation and reasoning occur.

…

Once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction—as something that just can’t be done—the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.

…

So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion—it is an inferior way of knowing—is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism. And the critique of religion’s content—it’s cotton-candy fluff—is the product of incredible ignorance.

If hate is the opposite of love, as many passages indicate, then why don’t we have a book called The Four Hates? Why don’t preachers fulminate against the scary hate of a mother for her crying infant (ἀστοργέω [a + storge]), the emotional hate of one’s ex-best-friend (ἀφιλέω [a + filos]), the even more passionate hate of one’s ex-lover (ὠράω [a+ eros]), while defending the disinterested hate (ἐγαπάω [a + agaph]) of the enemies of one’s country? Love is love. Hate is hate. They come in degrees; they are elicited for different reasons. But in my study—of the NT, LXX, and Josephus so far—the essential character of each one is manifest in every instance.

May God help me to love what He loves and therefore hate what He hates.

Congratulations, Dustin!

Sidney Landau, lexicographer, has a firm handle on one of my favorite near-inspired dictums, “Usage determines meaning.”

He devotes some space in his book Dictionaries to covering the history of English usage disputes. In the 18th century, grammar “errors” provoked moral outrage and an explosion of books offering corrections! I found this little anecdote about Goold Brown, author of The Grammar of English Grammars (!, 1851), quite amusing:

Brown cites innumerable examples of actual “incorrect” usages from Lowth’s and Murray’s grammars as well as from the great writers of English literature, such as Addison. From any rational view he would seem to have collected a vast body of evidence to refute his own argument, but to Goold Brown the usage of the greatest writers was of no account compared to his own peculiar appreciation of the logic underlying grammar. p.246

Doug Wilson, Reformed apologist vs. Christopher Hitchens, eloquent atheist.

Check out the first 13 minutes of their new documentary, Collision, here.