Jayber Crow on Silence in Worship

Jayber on those beautiful moments of silence when the congregation stills itself before the living God:

“I liked the naturally occurring silences—the one, for instance, just before the service began and the other, the briefest imaginable, just after the last amen. Occasionally a preacher would come who had a little bias toward silence, and then my attendance would become purposeful. At a certain point in the service the preacher would ask that we ‘observe a moment of silence.’ You could hear a little rustle as the people settled down into that deliberate cessation. And then the quiet that was almost the quiet of the empty church would come over us and unite us as we were not united even in singing, and the little sounds (maybe a bird’s song) from the world outside would come in to us, and we would completely hear it.But always too soon the preacher would become abashed (after all, he was being paid to talk) and start a prayer, and the beautiful moment would end. I would think again how I would like for us all just to go there from time to time and sit in silence. Maybe I am a Quaker of sorts, but I am told that the Quakers sometimes speak at their meetings. I would have preferred no talk, no noise at all.

Congrats to Scott Lamb and Tim Ellsworth on Their Book on Pujols

Congratulations Scott Lamb and Tim Ellsworth on their new book on Albert Pujols, Pujols: More Than the Game.

I am very confident in the success of this book for two reasons: first, I was in Wal Mart with my boys over the weekend, and we browsed through their book selection. Lamb and Ellsworth’s book Pujols is there! If it’s in Wal Mart, it’s everywhere. I expect to see it in Borders and Barnes and Noble and whatever those bookstores in the airport are called. How do I get my book on the shelves in Wal Mart? The other thing that guarantees its success is the positive review it got from Challies. Case closed. Widely available and strongly recommended.

Congratulations guys!

Jayber Crow on Prayers and Hymns

I love this passage on the hymns of the faith. This paragraph, particularly what Jayber says about “Abide with Me,” wrenched my heart when I read it, and its hold on my mind brought me back to this book to type up these thoughts of Jayber (whose conduct, honestly, I found to be a little strange) to post them here. If you’re not blessed to know these songs, to have experienced the moving power of a congregation singing them, may this passage be a prod to that pleasure. Enjoy:

“What I liked least about the service itself was the prayers; what I liked far better was the singing. Not all of the hymns could move me. I never liked “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Jesus’ military career has never compelled my belief. I liked the sound of the people singing together, whatever they sang, but some of the hymns reached into me all the way to the bone: “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” “Rock of Ages,” “Amazing Grace,” “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lifts of feeling, rising up and going out forever. Old Man Profet, who was a different man on Sunday, used to draw the notes at the ends of verses and refrains so he could listen to himself, and in fact it sounded pretty. And when the congregation would be singing “We shall see the King some-day (some-day),” Sam May, who often protracted Saturday night a little too far into Sunday morning, would sing, “I shall see the King some-day (Sam May).”I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn’t really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but they still liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another’s help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude. I loved to hear them sing “The Unclouded Day” and “Sweet By and By”:

We shall sing on that beautiful shore
The melodious songs of the blest . . .

And in times of sorrow when they sang “Abide with Me,” I could not raise my head.”

This last line about “Abide with Me” has deep resonance in the novel, for Jayber has walked through the valley of the shadow of death with people he loves, as those people lost loved ones who could never be replaced. So the line draws its beauty from the lyrics of the hymn and the pain Jayber has shared with these people. The weight of those who sing the faith bows his head in worship.

From Every Tribe, and Tongue, and People, and Nation

Weep and burn indeed:

They’re Giving It Away

Exhausted your book budget? Promised not to buy anymore books for a while?

Christianaudio.com has a deal for you: this month they’re giving away R. C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God for free.

Why not redeem that time in the car on the commute? Or on the lawnmower, or whatever. The price is right. Enjoy.

 

Here’s a Book My Wife and I Need

My sweet wife and I have had a number of conversations lately about shepherding our children as they begin to engage technology, and this includes what we model for them. We need discernment in this area, so I’m eager to see the book that Tim Challies has written on the issue, The Next Story. Here’s a trailer for the book:

And I appreciated the interview that Matt Perman did with Tim (I linked Part 2 and you can get to Part 1 from there). Thanks for your work, Tim!

 

Jayber Crow on “Weathering” Sermons

Can God bring good out of bad preaching? Here’s Jayber:

“In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons. Or I would look out the windows. In winter, when the windows were closed, the church seemed to admit the light strictly on its own terms, as if uneasy about the frank sunshine of this benighted world. In summer, when the sashes were raised, I watched with a great, eager pleasure the town and the fields beyond, the clouds, the trees, the movements of the air—but then the sermons would seem more improbable. I have always loved a window, especially an open one.”

Notice how he speaks of “weathering” sermons, then talks a lot about the weather. Are there symbolic connections in this paragraph between bad preaching and winter and darkness? Are there connections between the word of God going forth to give life and summer? Is Jayber seeing a connection between better sermons being harder to believe? Is this a symbolic reference to a window at the end? Is good preaching a window on the world? What do you think?

Jayber Crow on Preachers

Are you a minister who wonders what people really think? I suspect that the words people say to me probably tend to be a lot nicer than the thoughts they keep in their heads. At Andrew Peterson’s recommendation, I read (listened to the audio book) Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. Wendell Berry gives us Jayber’s honest thoughts on church: preachers, preaching, prayers, hymns, and silence in worship services. These will be posted one by one so they can be savored. Here’s what Jayber had to say about preachers:

“And a few of those young preachers were bright and could speak—I mean they could sound as if they were awake, and make you listen—and they were troubled enough in their own hearts to have something to say. A few had wakefully read some books. Maybe one or two of these might even have stayed on in Port William, if they could have lived poor enough. But they would have a wife and little children, and the economic winds would blow them past and beyond. And what, maybe, would Port William have done with them if they had stayed? Port William tends to prefer to hear what it has heard before.”

 

No Heart, No Courage

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 26.

That line: “We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst” deserves much thought as we look around today.

 

Need a Good Reason to Shop in a Bookstore Instead of Online?

Check out Dr. Mohler’s post here.

 

On Engaging Your World with Tom Crouse on February 16

At 2pm On February 16 at 2pm you can tune in at www.engagingyourworld.com for a live interview with Tom Crouse about God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment.

UPDATE: Rescheduled for Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 2pm, Lord willing.

On Knowing the Truth Radio Today

Tune in live right now right here for an interview on God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment.

Update: the audio from the interview is here.

Part 2 of the CBD Interview

Part 1 of Matthew Miller’s interview with me is here, and Part 2 is now online.

The interview is mainly about God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology, but the questions in Part 2 ranged from Inerrancy to the New Perspective with the SBC reformation in between.

Glenda’s Story

From Elisabeth Ellliot’s foreword:

“Abandonment, abortion, abuse, addiction, adultery, alcoholism, alienation, anorexia–words hardly understood a few generations ago but now on everyone’s tongue, words we can hardly escape if we pick up a newspaper or turn on television. It is generally taken for granted that these sins and sorrows can be dealt with only by law, or by something we heard little about years ago–counseling. The results of such measures are not always brilliant.

Glenda’s Story, comprising all of those ‘A’ words, reveals the wondrous efficacy of a far older answer, an answer far less frequently sought today except as a desperate venture–the Cross of Jesus.”

The second to last paragraph in the book reads like this:

“I have heard people argue for abortion ‘because the child would be better off never to see life than to be abused and violated. It is better to be dead than unwanted,’ they say. May I offer my life–and the lives of my children–as a contradiction to that argument?”

My friend Justin Tubbs loaned me this powerful testimony of God’s grace and the cleansing and healing and renewing beauty of the gospel, and I commend it to you.

Review of Accordance

Accordance 9. By Oak Tree Software. 2010. Price varies depending upon the package purchased. (877) 339-5855. http://www.accordancebible.com.

Having heard so many Mac users rave about both Apple machines and Accordance Bible Software, I determined that the next time a PC in my possession died, I would switch to a Mac to see what all the fuss was about. The day came (no surprise to Mac users), and the switch was made. In recent months I have been learning the world of Apple and Accordance. This review will focus on Accordance Bible Software, but some Mac comments will be inevitable. Along the way I will mainly compare Accordance and BibleWorks. I am also grateful to have and use Logos 4, but I will not say much more about it. The main benefit of Logos is its massive electronic library. If you don’t want a big electronic library and you operate a PC, BibleWorks is for you. If you don’t want a big electronic library and you operate a Mac, Accordance is the obvious choice. It is possible to get software that will enable you to run Accordance on a PC, or BibleWorks on a Mac, but the only reason for doing this would be if you had been using one of them and were switching platforms and did not want to purchase and learn the other software. In what follows I will comment on price, environment, my one big complaint (which really isn’t about Accordance), search capacity, and the thing that has me most excited about the switch to Accordance.

I begin with some surface level comparisons. Macs tend to cost significantly more than PC’s, and Accordance Bible Software is considerably more expensive than BibleWorks. The basic BibleWorks package comes with every English Bible translation you could imagine, while the comparably priced Accordance package comes with a couple English Bibles and you will pay $30 to $40 for each additional one. BibleWorks comes with BDB unabridged. If you want the complete BDB in Accordance, the price is $50–$70, depending on whether you are upgrading from within a package. BibleWorks comes with the Syriac Peshitta and the Aramaic Targums, the Peshitta will cost you $100 in Accordance and the Targums another $100. Somehow BibleWorks is able to bundle BDAG and HALOT and offer these two lexicons for $212. The BDAG and HALOT bundle costs $299 from Accordance. In general I think it is fair to say that less money will get more texts in BibleWorks, though more can be done with the texts you pay to get in Accordance. These observations about prices should not be taken as complaints. Workers are worthy of their wages, and these companies are rendering a tremendous service and making precious resources available at a fraction of the retail price.

PC’s are notoriously unstable, but I have always found BibleWorks reliable. It suffers only from its environment: the PC’s in my possession take a long time to wake up, often need to be restarted, and seem to be constantly downloading updates of one sort or another. The Mac knows no such instability or sluggishness. It is fast, responsive, and smooth. Accordance Bible Software has the Mac advantage, though it does come at a price.

Running Accordance on a Mac does not return us to the Garden of Eden, however, and not everything is perfect. My biggest disappointment has been the fact that Word for Mac simply will not handle right-to-left text correctly, making it impossible to copy Hebrew text from Accordance, paste it into Word for Mac, and produce a structural layout of the text. Accordance/Mac users tell me that Mellel, a word-processing software developed in Israel, can do this, but I’ve already paid twice as much for this machine and I refuse to shell out the extra cash for Mellel. The $30–$50 Mellel would cost me could be used to purchase the texts of the Apostolic Fathers in Accordance (Lightfoot ed., which comes with BibleWorks at no extra charge, the Holmes ed. costs $100 in Accordance). When I need to do a structural layout of a Hebrew text, I will be returning to my trusty copy of BibleWorks on a not-so-trusty but functional PC. I will probably go there when I need to search the Apostolic Fathers as well.

I hasten to observe that this my biggest complaint has to do with something that is a problem with Microsoft Word for Mac. It is not a problem with Accordance, which has been nothing but impressive. I also hasten to add that I still love BibleWorks and find it to be nothing but impressive. I have found the two programs comparable in terms of search capacity. If I run up against a search that I don’t know how to do, someone knows how to do it, and a google search, or a scan of instructional material, or a phone call to a knowledgeable friend quickly resolves the difficulty. I would also observe that in my years of working from Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic to teach and preach the Bible and write articles, books, and reviews, I simply have not needed to do that many complicated searches. Most searches are simple and straightforward. Admittedly, most of the time I am not doing technical grammatical work, but neither are most of the people using these programs. So I am confident that BibleWorks and Accordance can both do whatever you need them to do in the way of smart searches. Let me say, too, that the best way to learn the way words are used and how grammatical constructions work is not to spend a lot of time doing searches with powerful Bible software but to spend a lot of time reading and re-reading the biblical texts in the original languages.

What most excites me about Accordance is the way it grants access to the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament. Not only can the high-resolution photographs of the manuscripts taken by Dan Wallace and his team at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) be integrated into Accordance, Accordance has fully tagged, fully searchable transcriptions of the NT text of Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Washingtonensis, and the NT Papyri from Comfort and Barrett. At some point I read of an NT scholar in the 1800s who tried to access the NT exclusively from the manuscripts. That possibility is now open not just to those who live near a library with manuscripts but to all who have Accordance. And the tagged and searchable texts hold out astonishing promise for the study of, among other things, the nomina sacra. Reading the text from the photos in Accordance will do more for one’s understanding of the challenges involved in the task of NT text criticism than countless books and articles on the topic could ever accomplish. The images are clear and legible, but not everything appears on them. For instance, take a look at the photographs of 1 Corinthians 14 from Codex Vaticanus provided by Philip B. Payne here. Not as much can be seen in the CSNTM photograph of a facsimile of Vaticanus provided here. This, of course, is not Accordance’s fault, as they are simply integrating the CSNTM photographs.

The pricetag on both Mac and Accordance may be high, but the treasures yielded are priceless. The unique ability to search a fully tagged text of the earliest manuscripts of the NT is astonishing and unprecedented, and to my knowledge Accordance provides the only way to do it. Proverbs 16:16 insists that wisdom and understanding are better than silver and gold. Accordance Bible Software is definitely a means to wisdom and understanding, limited only by the capacity of the human who makes use of it.

Dempster Reviews God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment

Stephen Dempster is Professor of Religious Studies at Crandall University in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada and is the author of a book I learned a ton from and love to recommend: Dominion and Dynasty: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible (IVP, 2003).

His prose is beautifully constructed and communicates profound insight, so I was delighted to read his review of God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology.

Here are the encouraging opening paragraphs:

When Don Quixote embarked on his quest for the impossible, it was a humorous and tragic adventure. He tilted at windmills which he thought were giants. He looked at peasant girls and saw noble ladies. And he thought an old dilapidated tavern was a castle. Obviously, Quixote was carrying “a few bricks short of a load.”

Some might think that James Hamilton Jr. follows in the footsteps of the knight-errant from La Mancha. In his book God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment, Hamilton sets out in pursuit of the holy grail of biblical theology—the elusive centre, the main point of the Bible. This theologian-errant is not deterred by the countless attempts before him, nor by the admonitions of contemporary scholars to give up such a quixotic quest.

As a biblical theologian, Hamilton comes with good background knowledge, which is evident throughout his 600 plus page volume. It is also abundantly evident that he is not a few bricks short of a load. Over the last few years he has been distinguishing himself with publications in the area of biblical theological themes.[1] This book is in fact a sort of culmination of his studies to date.

You can read the rest here. I appreciate Dempster’s insights and the things he identifies as strengths as well as what he says could be sharpened, and I want to thank him for reading my work and working hard to write a stellar review.

Interview with Bryan Litfin on His First Novel, The Sword

Bryan Litfin is Professor of Theology at Moody Bible Insitute. His book Getting to Know the Church Fathers: An Evangelical Introduction, is what you would expect from a patristics scholar, but now he has also written a novel, The Sword, which is the first volume in “The Chiveis Trilogy.”

The book is set in a future time when the Bible has been lost, only to be rediscovered. I think it captures the kind of society the gospel encountered as it spread through the Roman world.

I got The Sword at ETS, and after our Christmas company left town I indulged myself on it. I could not put it down, and I commend it to you. As I told Bryan when I wrote to ask him if I could interview him here, the book made me love my sweet wife more, made me more grateful to have the whole Bible, and helped me feel more deeply the sheer wonder of life in this world. I commend it to you.

Thanks to Bryan for agreeing to do this interview! I hope it spurs you to pick up The Sword. My questions are in bold, followed by Bryan’s answers.

Was The Sword your first foray into fiction or was it preceded by other published short stories or books?

In 2007 I published a popular-academic book on the ancient church called Getting to Know the Church Fathers: An Evangelical Introduction (Brazos).  After that came out, I got bitten by the fiction bug and decided to try my hand at it. The Sword is my first fictional work and is the first volume in a trilogy.

What have been the most significant works of fiction that shaped your approach to writing?

I’m not sure it was fictional works that primarily shaped my writing. Rather, I read many, many books on “how to write fiction” and those played a larger role. However, there are certainly some novels that influenced my thinking. The Lord of the Rings was inspirational. In Christian fiction, I point to the works of Stephen Lawhead, particularly Byzantium. Two other novels that influenced me, and which remind me of The Sword in some ways, are Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, and Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz.

The book reminds me in some ways of Quo Vadis. Was that novel significant in your thinking?

No, but I have been told by others I should read this and I’d like to.

How did you approach the writing of fiction? I’ve seen references to the research you did on writing fiction. Was there something that was most helpful in your work? Did you read “how to” books or just great fiction itself?

My approach to fiction was to (a) admit I’m a total novice, (b) go research and become knowledgeable,  and (c) start writing. I went to the public library and read everything they had on the craft of fiction. I also bought some “how-to” books and they were very helpful. In particular I was struck by some of the plot techniques for developing the archetypal hero in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Another insightful book was Ron Benrey, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Christian Fiction.

Yet I have to say, I learned more about writing fiction from my excellent editor, Erin Healy, than from any particular book.  She and I worked through the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb.  Along the way I was like a disciple sitting at the feet of a master. The quality of Erin’s own books prove she knows writing. The Sword greatly benefitted from her expertise.

I saw a video clip where you said teaching was your “day job.” Did you work on the novel through the “meat” of the day or only on the margins?

My approach has been to take the time afforded by the academic schedule to write my novels.  During the semester, my main writing day is Thursday, when I do not have classes.  I also write intensively over Christmas break, spring break, and summertime. When things get intense I also snatch time at night or on the weekends. The process of writing The Sword took more than three years from the day I woke up with the idea to the day it came out from Crossway.  Sometimes I would write a few chapters and then set it aside.  For example I wrote chapters 1-4, then I did not come back to it for several weeks.  It bothered me the whole time that I had left Ana with a bag over her head.  I was relieved to get it off her in chapter 5.

Was writing this book significantly different than the academic writing you’ve done?

Yes!  I have found fiction to be a very different kind of writing. Of course, the process of putting words together and then re-reading them to choose better words or make it smoother is the same. But the content of the words is so much different than academic writing!  I am not trying to argue a thesis in fiction.  I am trying to entertain, and to elucidate the human condition before God along the way.  I had to learn all sorts of things that academic publishing does not teach you:  like how to do attributions (“he said”), or when to “show” and when to “tell,” or how to stay in a character’s point of view, or how to arrange scenes for maximum effect.  It has been a steep learning curve but I’m well along it now, I think.

The other main difference is the creativity that is required. The content of academic writing is there for you already. You just have to lay out the evidence from your research. But in fiction, you are dependent on ideas hitting you. Sometimes you have to daydream for an hour before you write anything down. You have to visualize it, see it in your mind. For me this was greatly aided by traveling around in Europe with my students or on trips of my own. I could “see” the landscape of Chiveis. I had walked the same trails that my characters were walking.

I’m curious as to what influenced the decision to do a trilogy as opposed to a stand alone volume – was it simply too long a story for one book?

I pitched the book as a potential trilogy but Crossway did not sign onto that right away. They only contracted The Sword at the outset. However, once it was written, we could all see that the ending begged for more. And that is probably the number one thing my readers tell me: “You left me hanging, I can’t wait until the next one!” Well, The Gift comes out this April, and my editor Erin says it is even better than The Sword.

I think you are right that it was too long a story for one book.  I always conceived of this as a hero’s tale, a quest, an epic. The trick is to make each novel stand on its own as a complete work, and yet to write an over-arching story that encompasses all three.  I am in the process right now of concluding that metanarrative. All I can say is, Teofil and Anastasia have one incredible adventure – and the things they encounter in The Sword are just the tip of the iceberg.

Do you have the plot for the other two books fully mapped out, or is there a general destination with things developing along the way?

Over time I have learned what my personal approach to writing is.  I outline extensively. I write a scene by scene account of what I think is going to happen.  I take notes on what the main theological through-line is. I delineate themes I want to weave into the story.  I discipline myself not to start writing until I know where things are headed. This keeps me from writing myself into plot dead-ends.  However, I maintain flexibility with that outline.  Sometimes the characters get “talking to each other” as my fingers are flying over the keyboard, and I run with it. Sometimes a scene takes a different turn on me.  Sometimes I type a line and then realize, “There. That’s it. That is how the scene must conclude,” even though I had other ideas. So it is a balance between mapping it out and letting the Muses take over.

Do you have other fiction and/or academic writing planned after the trilogy?

During the time I have been writing fiction I have not stopped my scholarly publishing. After the conclusion of the Chiveis Trilogy I hope to write a church history book and some more articles and chapters in academic works. But I have enjoyed fiction too much to stop doing it, if the Lord gives me further opportunities. My instinct is to go with historical fiction, set in the ancient church period since that is my academic specialty.

————

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions, Bryan!

Those who want more on The Chiveis Trilogy should check out the website, where there are videos and forums.

Enjoy the adventure!

What Did Wells and Vanhoozer Do?

From the interview on the CBD Academic blog:

Matthew: In your book, you state “this book, quixotic as it may seem, seeks to do for biblical theology what Kevin Vanhoozer has done for Hermeneutics and David Wells has done for evangelical theology” (38). Can you unpack this statement for us in direct relation to your project?

Hamilton: In my humble opinion, modern western culture is committing intellectual suicide.

In his book Is There a Meaning in This Text?, Kevin Vanhoozer lovingly seeks to intervene by patiently vindicating the idea that the task of interpreting a text is the task of seeking to understand what the author of a text meant to communicate (authorial intent). The idea of seeking an author’s intent has been slandered and maligned with all manner of sophisticated sounding logical and rhetorical fallacies from scoundrels who refuse to do unto others as they would have done unto themselves. When they write, they want to be interpreted according to their intent, but they would deny this privilege to the authors of the texts they distort and pervert with so much post-modern  slime. Vanhoozer waded through all the muck, exposing logical and rhetorical fallacies and cutting a path for any who wish to follow him to the solid ground of virtuous interpretation.

In his book, No Place for Truth, David Wells shows how evangelicalism saw liberal protestantism committing intellectual suicide with western culture, felt left out, and tried to join the party. The problem is not so much that the big ideas of Christianity were challenged as it is that big ideas have become unfashionable. As a result, in many churches the big truths that make Christianity what it is are hidden away so that no one will be troubled with the unpleasant chore of being a thinking human. Wells is calling the church to help humans be what they are–image bearers of God endowed with faculties sufficient for knowing, experiencing, and worshiping God and his mysteries.

So I see Vanhoozer and Wells (and many others!) courageously, patiently, lovingly seeking to save the west, and I want to follow them as they follow Christ. People make all kinds of claims today about how diverse the theology of the Bible is, but what is so shocking about the Bible is its unity, not its diversity. So Vanhoozer engaged the battle for hermeneutics, Wells for evangelical theology, and I’m trying to join the fray on the biblical theological front (following in the footsteps of Tom Schreiner, Desi Alexander, Greg Beale, Stephen Dempster, and others). I don’t know if I’m worthy to stand with them, but I’m honored to seek to join these knights-errant as a fool for Christ’s sake seeking to steward the mysteries of God.

Biblical Theology Interview on the CBD Academic Blog

Matthew Miller writes an academic blog for Christianbook.com, and he has put up a very encouraging post about God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment, which is followed by an interview on the book.

“How many Christmas cards do you get with the word ‘judgment’?”

“Interview”

He raised great questions that I enjoyed answering.

It Was His Dog

Moving post from Greg Sykes. An excerpt:

I’m reminded of one of the greatest scenes of such frustrated captivity in modern literature. In Eugene Sledge’s phenomenal memoir of WWII, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, Sledge has spent over two months in brutal, subhuman combat on the filthy, stench-ridden island of Okinawa. He has seen atrocities that would destroy the most hardened soldier — and it did in many cases.

He had watched the Japanese strap dynamite to civilian babies and children, sending them into close proximity to the Marines so they could be exploded by gunfire. He had fallen into a hole with a decaying corpse and had the grubs and rotting flesh slide within his own shirt and dungarees. He had killed innumerable enemy soldiers in their suicidal Banzai charges, and he had watched many of his closest friends die.

But he endured the misery and soldiered on . . . until he received a letter from home (Mobile, Alabama). As he read the letter, he finally crossed his breaking point — tears racked him and he lost control. The days and months of being forced to do things that no man should be forced to endure finally caught up to him and the captivity of his role as a Marine in the Pacific overwhelmed him.

And what was in the letter, you ask? Sledge’s mother had written him to tell him that his dog had died.

Reasonable or not, that information shook Sledge to his core. Yes, he had seen atrocities — on a daily basis — that made the death of his dog seem insignificant. But, as he kept telling his companions, that was his dog. He had raised it from a pup. And he should have been there to see it die. It was his dog, he kept saying, as if that explained it.

Read the whole thing for Sykes’s reflections on what we can learn from this.