BJU Press in Logos

BJU Press has made many of its titles available in Logos Bible software, and there are a number of pre-pub collections gathering interest now:

• The Christian Living collection puts together a number of the booklets the Seminary has been putting out on various issues, along with Layton Talbert’s Not By Chance.
• The Pete Steveson commentary collection offers his volumes on Daniel, Isaiah, Proverbs, Psalms, and Ezra-Nehemiah-Esther. When I’ve used his Proverbs volume I’ve generally found it helpful. Same goes for his comments on Esther. Can’t speak to the others.
• The BJU Press Preaching Collection includes Dr. Bell’s OTT and Jose Linares’ dissertation on preaching OT narrative. I’m going through the former and I’ve glanced at the footnotes and TOC in the latter. It looked like he knew what he was talking about!
• The BJU Press Catch-All Collection makes for some odd pairings, but Talbert’s book on Job is in there, as well as Brown on Ezra.
• The Other BJU Press Catch-All Collection makes for some more odd pairings; I’m not sure what Matt Hoskinson’s dissertation on assurance has to do with Fred Moritz on separation. Maybe I’m missing something.

(I’m told that BJU Press did not come up with these collections; Logos did.)

Dempster on Samson

A perceptive observation from a book full of such insights into the Old Testament:

Stephen Dempster:

The structure of Judges shows that Israel gradually descends into a moral and political quagmire, and this is mirrored in the sequence of judges themselves, most of whom are questionable characters. But the last one is a particularly striking mirror-image of the nation. Samson, the supernaturally born Israelite, was set apart as a Nazirite with a distinctive vocation. He constantly breaks his religious vows, is enamoured of Philistine women, loses his identity and physical strength through these encounters, becomes a slave and has his eyes gouged out by the enemy. He represents his own people, who had a supernatural origin, were set apart from among the nations with a distinctive vocation, broke their vows and were enamoured of foreign idols, until finally they lost their identity and spiritual power and became the blind slaves of their oppressors in exile.

My Logos Library, Visualized

Some computer nerd across the pond made a cool site that will show you your whole Logos library in visual format. Here’s mine.

Setting it up is a little involved, but it’s neato. You can even click on a cover and it will open up that book in your Logos library!

A separate page shows you more info about your library: which books you’ve hidden, which books are most popular, which are most highly rated.

Few people bother rating their Logos books, however, so ratings tend to appear artificially low, I think.

Review: The Priority of Preaching

The Priority of Preaching by Christopher Ash

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Christopher Ash is a preacher who trains preachers, and his little book The Priority of Preaching provides a unique angle on that training. He mines the example of Moses’ long sermon in Deuteronomy for the contemporary (expository) preacher. He places particular weight on the fact that Moses predicts that a succession of prophets will serve Israel—to them the Jews were told to listen (Deut. 18:15–22). The content of their messages was, Ash argues, supposed to be the written words of God.

I’m afraid that connection—and several other connections he made between New Testament preaching practice and supposed Old Testament precedent—is where he lost me. It feels awkward to say so, but Ash actually seemed stronger when he was relating general insights about preaching than when he was trying to tie those insights directly to Old Testament texts.

For example, Ash points out that

an interactive Bible study is not culturally-neutral. To sit around drinking coffee with a book open, reading and talking about that book in a way that forces me to keep looking at the book and finding my place and showing a high level of mental agility, functional literacy, spoken coherence and fluency, that is something only some of the human race are comfortable doing… For those who can do it, it may well be profitable; but many people can’t, and just feel daunted or excluded by the exercise. (28)

Ash wonders if we have unwittingly “contributed to making some of our churches more monocultural than they might otherwise be” by insisting on this kind of exercise. What do we do for those people who lack the education or fluency to participate in small-group Bible study? They need to learn the word, too. If a back-and-forth dialogue won’t work, what will? Ash says there are two options, preaching and theater. Of course, he opts for the former. He makes the perceptive argument, one going back to the Reformation, that theater only produces people who know Bible stories but don’t know what they mean.

Ash attempts, however, to tie this argument back to Deuteronomy (through Moses’ prediction that preaching prophets would come to guide Israel)—and I, at least, wasn’t quite ready to follow. But that doesn’t invalidate his excellent insight.

I had the same feeling multiple times throughout the book. Perhaps added OT study will persuade me that he was right, but for now I believe that the way God ruled His people Israel and the way Jesus guides His church are not meant to be tied together as closely as Ash assumes. (We definitely can and must learn from the OT, but it’s not always a simple process.)

Critique done. Because this was a warm and insightful book by someone whose heart beats for God’s word to spread and be taught accurately.

Let me just tick off some of the insights that are now bathed in neon yellow in my copy of Ash’s book:

• “Submission is not the same as discussion. Discussion is comfortably in line with the spirit of the age. We are happy to discuss and interpret…. There is a place for discussion and questioning to clarify our grasp of meaning and correct one another’s blind spots. But all too often, discussion is one of the ways we avoid submission.” (35, 36) Ash argues that preaching should not be replaced by dialogue, although it should be so engaging as to provoke a silent dialogue. “There may be times when a silent dialogue in preaching is actually preferable to a spoken dialogue. Some so-called dialogue is really simultaneous or alternating monologue…. Good spoken dialogue is easier said than done. How often a dialogue is hijacked by some over-talkative person asking questions that most of the others don’t want answered! Sometimes a coherent reasoned exposition is interrupted by irrelevant questions. Spoken dialogue sounds good, and it is sometimes necessary, but there are both practical and theological reasons for working at the silent dialogue of good preaching.” (54–55)

• “There is not mystical short-cut, whereby the lazy preacher can hope to be clothed by some anointing, so that his ill-prepared words will come with the power of God…. Godly preparation is a struggle, but there is no substitute for the time and the pain of this engagement with the word.” (40, 42)

• “Those who think [the] doctrine of authority puffs up the preacher have not begun to feel the sheer terror of being a preacher…. To be a preacher is one of the most deeply humbling experiences in the world.” (42)

• “Liberalism claims to permeate and influence culture, but only does so in the way that a mouse permeates a cat; it is swallowed by it.” (51)

• “Let us not teach, but also preach. If teaching is like the signpost which explains clearly to us where we ought to go and how to go there, preaching is like the friendly but firm shove from behind to get us started on actually going there and to keep us moving. We must teach: exhortation without teaching…. is an act of verbal aggression, an invasion of my personal space.” (64)

Now for two final insights that deeply benefited me. I’ve seen writers (typically left-leaning ones) praise community interpretation of the Bible, but I’ve never seen anyone flesh out what it means. Ash, a conservative, gave the best insight on the value of communal reading of Scripture:

“We are to be a community who interpret the word; but the kind of interpretation we are to aim at is much more than agreeing what it means. We are to interpret the word in the sense of becoming a living visible interpretation of the word, a community in which the word of Christ is lived out and made concrete.” (101)

In addition, he pointed out that “attending church” online removes the mutual accountability of knowing what we’ve all heard as a community:

“When I gather with my brothers and sisters to hear the word preached, it is still possible to hit the ‘Off’ button. I can look out of the window; I can read Wesley’s instructions for congregational singing in Christian Hymns; I can read the 39 Articles at the end of the Book of Common Prayer; I can doodle; I can daydream. But it is not quite so easy. For I have sitting around me brothers and sisters who might notice; and I would hate to be seen to be inattentive…. When we listen together, you know what word I have heard, and I know what word you have heard. I’ve heard it!… We are accountable to one another for our response, and this stirs us up and encourages us to respond as we ought.” (99)

The book ends with an excellent and brief appendix presenting seven arguments for expository preaching.

Pick up this book, read the appendix, and then dip into a chapter for some insights. If the sustained argument didn’t quite carry me along, I still feel I benefited from the loving work of a careful brother.



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Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.

Diamond views the history of the entire world through evolutionary lenses, and he has no room for God except as an evolutionary development that needs to be explained by reference to those lenses. But if I put on my biblical lenses, there’s still great value to be had in Diamond’s work.

Those biblical lenses tell me that God has a Plan A (a decretive will) that human history never deviates from, but that He uses earthly means to accomplish that heavenly work. The various plants and animals available to different peoples is surely part of how He structured his story.

I found Diamond’s description of plant domestication to be particularly interesting and engaging. I had heard about corn domestication, but it never occurred to me to wonder when and how most other staple foods were brought under human dominion.

And that little word is a tip-off to another major portion of the biblical lens: I read Diamond’s sweeping narrative (can anything but the Bible be more sweeping?) not as a record of the evolutionary progress of homo sapiens but as an outworking of God’s original mandate to man:

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth. (Gen 1:28 CSB)

Perhaps I’m building too much on a minor point, but I believe that the word “blessed” suggests that this mandate is both an indicative and an imperative. God didn’t just give man a task but a blessing. Maoris, Austronesians, and Incas all exercise dominion whether they know about Yahweh or not, because God blessed them with that ability and yearning.

I can’t say I know the reasons behind God’s providential organization of the continents, but Diamond persuaded me that the obvious difference in axes is significant to world history. Simply the first “food production package”—the full suite of plant and animal domesticates necessary for hunter gatherers to become sedentary farmers—developed in the Fertile Crescent (any connections to the Bible there?). And that zone connects to others contiguously all across the massive Eurasian continent, making it easy for the package to spread. The same is not true for north-south oriented continents like Africa and the Americas. Developments in dominion, up to and including writing, could not make their way easily up and down through different temperature zones and over mountain ranges. And Eurasia had the best candidates for plant and animal domestication to begin with.

It was the superior food production package which gave Eurasians the edge anytime they encountered other cultures. High yields-per-man-hour allowed some people to specialize in politics, marshaling man-power to produce even higher yields through things like irrigation products. This sedentary lifestyle also helped farmers develop guns, germs, and steel. It was these things which were most effective in raising Eurasians to prominence over others. Germs were especially powerful. Farmers living close together developed immunities to certain germs, and those germs utterly annihilated North American Indian populations without anyone ever having to fire a shot. (The story of Pizarro capturing the Inca god-king Atahuallpa is especially vivid and interesting.)

In any case, this book answered for me decisively the question of whether racial superiority is the reason Eurasians have taken the ascendance in many ways in this world. Diamond tackles that question head-on and gives a firm answer: no.



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A Good Way to Explain It