The FREE (!) Dissertation-Writing Service that I Used

There is a great dissertation-writing service online that is completely FREE!

You have to add appropriate footnotes, and it takes a while to produce a finished document of 300 pages, but with this helpful tool you, too, can get a Ph.D.

It was created for the art world originally, but it worked great for me. For my dissertation, I just did some find-and-replace work to remove art terms and put in theological ones (dadaism became the New Perspective on Paul, for example). But some terms are both artistic and theological (existentialism, inspiration), so it wasn’t as much work as you would think.

(Please ignore the second paragraph on the page. It was added after I began using this service.)

Blogape vs. C.S. Lewis? Joyfully, No.

My dissertation chapter on joy argues that the article on joy from the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible is mistaken about much of the following.

Joy.

Positive human condition that can be either feeling or action. The Bible uses joy in both senses.

Joy as Feeling.

Joy is a feeling called forth by well-being, success, or good fortune. A person automatically experiences it because of certain favorable circumstances. It cannot be commanded.

The shepherd experienced joy when he found his lost sheep (Matt 18:13). The multitude felt it when Jesus healed a Jewish woman whom Satan had bound for 18 years (Luke 13:17). The disciples returned to Jerusalem rejoicing after Jesus’ ascension (Luke 24:52)…. Psalm 137:3 shows that the emotion cannot be commanded. The Jews’ captors wanted them to sing in the land of their exile, something they were unable to do. Faraway Jerusalem was their chief joy (Ps 137:6).

Joy as Action.

There is a joy that Scripture commands. That joy is action that can be engaged in regardless of how the person feels. Proverbs 5:18 tells the reader to rejoice in the wife of his youth, without reference to what she may be like. Christ instructed his disciples to rejoice when they were persecuted, reviled, and slandered (Matt 5:11, 12). The apostle Paul commanded continuous rejoicing (Phil 4:4; 1 Thess 5:16). James said Christians are to reckon it all joy when they fall into various testings because such testings produce endurance (Jas 1:2). First Peter 4:13 seems to include both action and emotion when it says, “But rejoice [the action] in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad [the emotion] when his glory is revealed.” Joy in adverse circumstances is possible only as a fruit of the Holy Spirit, who is present in every Christian (Gal 5:22)….

Here’s what I like about this: “Joy is a feeling called forth by well-being, success, or good fortune. A person automatically experiences it because of certain favorable circumstances.”

Here’s what I would add: It takes regeneration—and subsequent sanctification—to change us so that we automatically experience joy when we ought to. And maybe I’d adjust “automatically,” because I don’t want to dismiss the role of personal choice in our ability to find joy in trial, for example. But I tend to think that the choices that make me able to rejoice in trials happened a long time ago. And underneath even those choices was a new heart making me the kind of person who could possibly count it all joy when I fall into various trials.

Here’s what I don’t like about the BEB article on joy: emotionless joy is a contradiction in terms. You cannot engage in joy actions regardless of how you feel; joy is how you feel. I won’t get into all my reasons for saying that now; here’s just one: every major Koine-Greek lexicon defines χαρά and χαίρω with words like “joy, happiness, gladness,” and, yes, even “feeling.” Language is flexible, but not flexible enough to take emotion out of joy. Joy is irreducibly emotional. (In other news, Pope Benedict XVI was recently revealed to be a Catholic.)

But as I thought through this, my mind ran up an objection: Wait a minute, C.S. Lewis is someone who seems to know real joy; he has said some very insightful things about it. But didn’t he say that joy is not the same as happiness?

Good thought, mind. So I ran down the quote. Sure enough, my mind was right (I won’t say “as usual”—my dissertation committee has convinced me that that’s not true). But ouch. Disagreeing with C.S. Lewis? I didn’t want to do that if I didn’t have to. My little mind is like a 1993 x86 PC to his brand new Mac.

Here is the footnote I ultimately wrote to resolve this conundrum (paragraphing added for clarity):

C.S. Lewis, it is true, said in his autobiography, “Joy…must be sharply distinguished both from happiness and from pleasure.” But the surrounding context reveals that he is not at all saying what the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible did. By “Joy” Lewis meant “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He said of that desire, “I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished from Happiness and from Pleasure…. Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is” (17–18).

But Lewis never claims that his Joy is what is meant by the words translated joy in Scripture. Moreover, Lewis felt free to use “enjoy” and other forms of “joy” in non-technical ways. He does so twice in one paragraph:

“The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford was A. K. Hamilton Jenkin…. Jenkin seemed to be able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was” (193).

Lewis even uses “joy” itself nontechnically:

“On every half-holiday I went dutifully to the B6 notice board to see whether my name was down to play that afternoon or not. And it never was. This was pure joy, for of course I hated games. My native clumsiness…had ruled out all possibility of my ever playing well enough to amuse myself, let alone to satisfy other players. I accepted games…as one of the necessary evils of life, comparable to Income Tax or the Dentist. And so, for a week or two, I was in clover” (86).Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995).

Lewis was not describing unsatisfied desires; he experienced happiness and pleasure and called it joy.

How to Pronounce Words Correctly

This is too good. You simply must read it.

The logical end to linguistic prescriptivism is a strange world.

HT: Mike Aubrey

Fatuousness

The only person I have ever known to be fatuous—the one person that comes to mind whenever I think of that word—was a preacher. Merriam-Webster’s definition for the word is unfortunately accurate: “complacently…foolish.”

Now I do not at all believe that this preacher is fatuous all day, every day. I believe better things about grace. I’m sure he has many redeeming qualities, and I will not call him a “fool,” full stop (Matt 5:22). I don’t believe he is a fool. Instead, I’m thinking of my only two encounters with him—times when he acted foolishly.

What did he do? He did what I’m afraid I myself have done: he preached unprepared. That was foolish, because in those particular instances—separated by several years and many miles—he happened to be preaching to multiple PhDs and MAs in biblical studies and theology who could have preached better messages than his with no advanced warning. His action was also complacent, because he seemed particularly bold in his ignorance: he picked two very controversial topics. Simply put, he had no idea what he was talking about and no business pretending he did. (This doesn’t mean uneducated men should never preach to PhDs or that they have nothing to tell them. It does mean they ought to be humble, choose a portion of Scripture they understand well, and perhaps seek some advance help.)

The times when I have preached unprepared, few if any PhDs were listening. The junior highers and elderly folks subjected to my half-baked sermons were none the wiser. But God knew. And I am sorry to say that each of those times—and I can think of especially three (!)—I vowed that it would never happen again.

I write to myself completely: don’t skimp on sermon prep because you have done years of formal prep in school; do some specific study of the passage at hand to make sure you really understand it. There are a few passages in Scripture I have studied and preached so often that I can preach carefully from them off the top of my head. But I can’t do that with most of the Bible. We preachers and teachers serve others best when we serve them well-prepared food, not something we nuked for 15 minutes on High that morning—or that moment!

“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (Jas 3:1).

The New BestCommentaries.com

BestCommentaries.com has gotten a nice redesign—and it added the one feature I most consistently missed. You can now look up a particular commentary set and see how high its individual volumes are ranked. That means you can quickly get an idea how valuable a given set is.

Today, because of Logos Bible Software, buying whole sets can make a lot of sense. Or it can waste a lot of them. The more highly recommended a set is overall, the more likely it is to be worthwhile for you to buy the whole thing rather than individual volumes.

Logos recently came out with an update to the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, and BestCommentaries.com helped me decide whether or not to save up for it.