2008-11-25

Phillips would like to know where Scripture ever endorses nominalism, disobedience, etc. and the idea that sanctification is ever something that is optional or may be delayed. http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2008/11/sanctification-challenge-find-me-verse_25.html

Challies reviews Twilight here. Basically, he finds the love in it to be obsessive, idolatrous, perverse, and just plain weird, with an obvious endorsement/connection to the 'forbidden fruit' idea (cf. Genesis 2:17). He perceives it to be incredibly sensuous, although not erotic or explicit in any way. He doesn't think that it is a good thing for daughters to be reading. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/challies/XhEt/~3/464957610/book-review---twilight.php

The U.N. passed an 'anti-blasphemy' resolution favouring Islamic nations. Hypocritically, Canada voiced concerns (remember, we have the unconstitutional and therefore illegal human rights commissions here, which aim to have you fined and jailed for proclaiming that homosexuality is a sin). http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?itemid=2989

Piper: Apparently potential unity between reformed churches in Calvin's day was shipwrecked because an influential individual consulted the stars for wisdom. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DGBlog/~3/465008534/

Turk is thankful for his pastor - perhaps others should give honour to their own as well. http://centuri0n.blogspot.com/2008/11/thankful.html

9Marks: Thabiti seems to indicate that community is very possible without small groups in large congregations, since very large groups can be united in a common purpose, as the early church was. It is also possible to suffer/rejoice together and have the same care for each other in a very large group. We should first recognize that the church is a body and functions as such, and that different responses don't indicate different concern. All the members own the whole body. http://blog.9marks.org/2008/11/apart-from-smal.html

Phillips has some good observations about being a pastor, which boil down to the contentment to defer judgment of your work until Christ comes. Almost everyone will think you're wrong, most won't understand your job, and those with less knowledge and experience will have proportional more stubbornness and say about how you should be doing it. http://bibchr.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-its-like-to-be-pastor.html

Bock writes that there is no one translation: "some translations are more dynamic (read try to give you the full sense in the English with English style- NLT, Voice, TNIV), while others are called more formal (tend to render more like the Greek with less expansive renderings- NASB, ESV). Formal translations claim to be more literal but that is really not true. They simply are more circumspect about how far to press the implications of their translation choices in wording. Dynamics are less shy about such moves. Some fall inbetween (NET, HCSB). Either a formal or a dynamic rendering might do a better job on a verse depending on the verse in question and the accuracy of the judgment made about the translation's force." http://blog.bible.org/bock/node/438

Mounce has some comments on ETS: "Dan [Wallace]’s [leading textual critic] conclusion is that it is better for the church to live with a little uncertainty about the text than with a false certainty based on incorrect text critical assumptions." This is interesting: "C.E. Hill’s discussion of the New Testament canon. He showed how the concept of canon was tied directly with the church’s sense of the authority of divine revelation and emphasized that the church did not have the right to select certain books but rather to recognize those writings that were self-authenticating. After all, he concluded, Jesus’ sheep hear his voice." [This is actually close to my approach to canon]. Commenting on some ad hominem argumentation against the ESV at ETS, Mounce says: "The solution to this debate is to recognize that there are different translation philosophies, different goals and means by which to reach those goals, and the goal of the translator is to be consistent in achieving those goals. In all but one of his examples, our translation was the one required by our translation philosophy." http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/pQHu/~3/464603723/ets-day-2-by-bill-mounce.html

Colin Smith gives a brief overview of the structure of the Qur'an. "The Qur'an is not so much a systematic book of history, doctrine, and exhortation, but rather a collection of sayings, speeches, and law compiled over a period of time." "for Muslims, the Qur'an is the word of Allah, given directly to Mohammad through the agency of the angel Gabriel. For the Muslim, therefore, anything the Qur'an teaches is the final authority on that subject." http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?itemid=2985

Swan argues that the latest clarification of Luther's 'idea of justication' by the Pope is anything but. Swan says, "For Luther, justification was actually totally of works, but those works were perfect and performed by the perfect savior, Jesus Christ. These works are acquired by faith, imputed to the sinner." Basically, the pope's statements don't actually interact with Luther's thinking, and they are quite ambiguous. http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?itemid=2986

Piper in This Momentary Marriage: "So I argue that staying married is not mainly about staying in love. It's about covenant-keeping. If a spouse falls in love with another person, one profoundly legitimate response from the grieved spouse and from the church is, "So what! Your being ‘in love' with someone else is not decisive. Keeping your covenant is decisive" http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/genderblog/~3/465469450/This-Momentary-Marriage-by-John-Piper-New-Call-to-Covenant-Keeping

Tony Payne comments on the large amount of people who went into ministry in the 80's - and those who were left behind, so to speak. He goes after an unhelpful dichotomy: "there is all the difference in the world between giving up our lives for Christ's cause as a fellow worker in the gospel and choosing to live a comfortable life in a nice suburb with a nice career, a nice family and a bit of Christianity on the side." He proposes a test: "someone who has denied themselves, who has taken up their cross and who wants to serve the gospel of Jesus makes their decisions in this order: What's the best gospel work for me to be involved in? Where do I need to live in order to share in that ministry? What sort of job do I need to fund living in that place in order to do that ministry?" http://solapanel.org/article/christian_ministry_and_normal_christians/#When:22:00:01Z

This article gives some thoughts on why God didn't accept Cain's offering. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2008/11/21/feedback-cains-offering

Charity is in decline. http://www.culture11.com/article/33735?page_art=1

CotW: This article points to a vegetarian lion as anecdotal support for the idea that carnivores were originally vegetarian (i.e. predation is postlapsarian). http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6147/

CotW: "Leading 20^th-century evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane famously said in 1949 that evolution could never produce ‘various mechanisms, such as the wheel and magnet, which would be useless till fairly perfect.’" This article connects the significance in this statement to the apparent magnetoreception in cows. http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6090/

CotW: A toy car is found in a rounded sandstone rock - a rock that looks tens of millions of years old. http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6128/

CotW: "There are numerous instances where small transposable elements thought to be endogenous retroviruses have been found to have functions, which invalidates the ‘random retrovirus insertion’ claim... Transposable elements seem to be involved in controlling the sequence and level of gene expression during development, by moving to/from the sites of gene control." A large proportion of the genome labelled as ERVs are promoters, starting transcription at different points, enabling different RNA transcripts to be formed from the same DNA. "This again debunks the idea that 98% of the human genome is junk, and it makes the inserted evolutionary spin look like a tacked-on nod to the evolutionary establishment." ID and biblical creationist proponents predicted ERVs would have a function. This "may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology." (citing an evolutionist). http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6146/

CotW: In commenting on star formation, this article says: "So, a question raised is why have the dust particles close to the star not evaporated when it is more than hot enough to vaporize them. This suggests the disks are very young indeed. To evolutionary scientists, the dust grains near the star would be perhaps hundreds of thousands to millions of years old. Over those kinds of time scales the dust could not still be so close to the star unless something keeps it from being too hot, e.g., gas shielding the dust from the star’s light. This is an example of how scientists assume processes they have not observed are at work in order to explain how the observed dust could still be present." http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v3/n1/star-formation-and-creation