Forthcoming from Brill

We have exciting news about a forthcoming volume that is edited by Stanley Porter from McMaster Divinity School.  The book in question is Paul and His Social Relations, published by Brill.  The expected publication date is December of this year.  So instead of going to see the Hobbit or celebrating Christmas, you should plan on spending the winter season holed up and reading this cozy volume.

Our own Joshua Walker has contributed one of the chapters with Andrew Pitts, "The Authorship of Hebrews: A Further Development in the Luke-Paul Relationship."  Some time back, Pitts and Walker did an interview (very interesting and worth reading if an argument for Paul's impact on Hebrews is of interest to you, as it should be to everyone) where they gave the basic thesis of their chapter:

The evidence we examine suggests that Hebrews likely represents a Pauline speech, probably originally delivered in a Diaspora synagogue, that Luke documented in some way during their travels together and which Luke later published as an independent speech to be circulated among house churches in the Jewish-Christian Diaspora. From Acts, there already exists a historical context for Luke’s recording or in some way attaining and publishing Paul’s speeches in a narrative context. Luke remains the only person in the early Church whom we know to have published Paul’s teaching (beyond supposed Paulinists) and particularly his speeches. And certainly by the first century we have a well established tradition within Greco-Roman rhetorical and historiographic stenography (speech recording through the use of a system of shorthand) of narrative (speeches incorporated into a running narrative), compilation (multiple speeches collected and edited in a single publication) and independent (the publication of a single speech) speech circulation by stenographers. Since it can be shown (1) that early Christians pursued parallel practices, particularly Luke and Mark, (2) that Hebrews and Luke-Acts share substantial linguistic affinities and (3) that significant theological-literary affinities exist between Hebrews and Paul, we argue that a solid case for Luke’s independent publication of Hebrews as a Pauline speech can be sustained. We don’t claim to have “solved” the problem of authorship in terms of absolutes or certainties, but we do think that this is the direction that the evidence points most clearly.

Amazon Kindle Fail

Amazon has announced its new line of Kindles, which will release on October 1st.  Among them are the new Kindle Fire, the Kindle Fire HD, and the Kindle Fire HD 8.9" (which is a horrible name).  I have absolutely no interest in any of the Kindle Fire family.  Go buy an iPad.

What does interest me, however, is the new Kindle Paperwhite.  Evidently, the screen is higher resolution and has a special backlight technology that is way less obnoxious than LED or LCD, which bounce light back into the space surrounding the screen.  It also has 2GB of memory and the ability to change spacing and font size in your eBooks.  BUT...

There's a huge but.  BUT Amazon has also announced that none of their future Kindles will support text to speech.  They supposedly tout this new line as upgrades.  Yes, they have a slightly larger memory.  Yes, they have the ability to change fonts.  And yet they have still not given me a reason to ever update my three year old Kindle 2 3G.  In fact, now I am clutching it tighter!  It still runs like a top, it still holds its battery charge for weeks. It holds all my books, and reads to me when I can't give it the attention it deserves.  Because Amazon has still not given me a reason to abandon my Kindle 2, I declare the new line of Kindles a complete and epic fail.

Why would you come out with a new line of Kindles and actually remove features that were there before?  It just makes no sense - it borders on stupidity, from a business perspective.  Without the text-to-speech, there is honestly no differentiating the Kindle from the Barnes & Noble Nook or any of the other e-Readers out there.

Generation of Barbarians?

Robert Bork once famously said that the next invading barbarian army would be populated by our own children. Such a notion really doesn't seem so outlandish in the light of the increased riots perpetuated by the young, bored, immature generation of monsters that occupy large swaths of society (and evidently, especially English society) all over the world.

I don't mean to be alarmist, but it sort of appears that the barbarian invasion of England has begun, and my guess is that this generation of bored, violent, impulsive youngsters is not going away any time soon. I want to highly recommend this article from the UK Daily Mail by Max Hastings. You may not agree with everything in the article, but there is no question that Hastings has his finger on something here. The truth is, if I hadn't read this article this evening, I probably would have typed out something similar at a furious pace.

While you're at it, it wouldn't hurt to read this pessimistic little article from the Christian Research Journal from a few years ago.

I just want to make one observation as well, from a Natural Law perspective. Reading this article from Max Hastings causes me to reflect that all men - secular or religious - know that what is happening the world over is wrong. They can see that children have been raised to think of themselves as impulsive animals and responsible to no one, and now the price is being paid by society.

[An additional article that I would recommend is by Mike Ovey. Another one by Scott Stinson is quite unsettling, as well.]

How Not to Treat Your Congregation

There are so many things wrong with this story, I wouldn't know where to begin.

Pastor charged with burglarizing church member's home

Funniest Article Title I've Seen in a Long Time

Is anyone else willing to say it? This is the funniest, most idiosyncratic title for a news story I've ever seen.

John Eldredge Says Mexican Drug Cartel Has Taken Him Out of Context

Not that the story is funny; once you read it, it seems like quite a serious thing going on. But there is no denying that this is a classic out-of-left-field title of an article. At first I wondered if it was The Onion who had done this.

Calvinism is Back

The Christian Science Monitor has another in a long line of stories on the ascendancy of Calvinism. Christian Faith: Calvinism is Back by Josh Burek

Choice nuggets from the article:

What newcomers at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) hear is hardly "Christianity for Dummies." Nor is it "Extreme Makeover: Born-Again Edition."
...
Much of modern Christianity preaches a comforting Home Depot theology: You can do it. We can help.
...
For all its controversy, predestination is something New Calvinists accept as part of their take-it-all-or-leave-it approach to the Bible.
...
Ultimately, Calvinism's contrast with chummier, Jesus-is-my-friend forms of evangelicalism may highlight a more fundamental change in the world of faith. Bestselling religion writer Phyllis Tickle sees the interest in Calvinism as the first phase of a backlash against the dominant religious trend of today: the rise of "Emergence Christianity."

Thanks for the nuggets, Josh. Though I'm almost certain you spelled Mark Dever's name wrong for pretty much the entire article.

Regaining Perspective During Hard Times

I have been thinking a great deal about the economic situation we find ourselves in. As a young person with two children, I find myself tremendously angry with the older generation because I know that it is they and their entitlement mentality which will be enslaving my children and I for many many years paying off the massive debt that they have accumulated for themselves in a matter of a few short years (federal deficits result in inflation, which is a form of hidden taxation which hurts low-income people the most). I find myself reading books on the Great Depression (Murray Rothbard's book America's Great Depression is quite good), and thinking about how things will turn out in the long run. "Will massive inflation set in?" (There's really no doubt that it will; I just think about it a lot.) "Will I be able to put a roof over my childrens' heads?" "What kind of world will we live in three or four years from now?" "Will America still be standing, or will it eventually collapse, as all Empires have in the past?" "Do I need to learn survival tactics and other stuff that crazy mountain-men are experts at?" These are questions I find myself laboring over. And they are the wrong questions for me - as a person who loves God and loves His glory - to be laboring over.

What I'm trying to say is, I've lost perspective. I have focused intensely on the human side of things, on the fiscal side of things, but I have lost focus on the big-picture questions about what economic downturns mean for the promotion of God's glory. Historically speaking, economic downturns usually mean religious revival (a subject which probably deserves further study and consideration in times like these, to be sure). This is of the utmost importance to those of us who love the glory of God and want His name to be delighted in above all else.

I really want to thank John Piper for the video below because of the encouragement and focus it helped me to regain. I hope it will benefit the rest of you as well.

The Unspeakable Horror Of Sin: A Question for Annihilationists

I was led to question the traditional belief in everlasting conscious torment because of moral revulsion and broader theological considerations, not first of all on scriptural grounds. It just does not make any sense to say that a God of love will torture people forever for sins done in the context of a finite life . . . It's time for evangelicals to come out and say that the biblical and morally appropriate doctrine of hell is annihilation, not everlasting torment.
-Clark Pinnock

Emotionally, I find the concept [of eternal conscious torment] intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain . . . Scripture points in the direction of annihilation.
-John Stott

Sin manifests itself in a lot of horrifying ways in our world. Every time that a bomb drops, a police siren sounds, or a door locks behind someone, we are reminded that we live in a fallen world full of depraved people just like ourselves. I consider myself a pessimist in the short term and an optimist in the long-term (because God's glory is the ultimate reason for all of this), but even I am occasionally surprised by the wicked things that my fellow humans are capable of (and I try to expect everything from them).

Read this news story, if you can bear it. Personally, since I have a 2 year old, this story stirs something within me I never knew until fatherhood. I was just thinking that someone like this can never be treated as badly as he deserves. What can men do to him that would right the wrong which he has done to this poor innocent (albeit fallen) child? My answer is, nothing. "Do not fear those who kill the body and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear. Fear him who, after he has killed has the power to cast into hell" (Luke 12:4–5). For Jesus, the suffering which men can cause to the body is nothing compared to what the infinite God is capable of. Temporal suffering will always end, one way or another. But, Jesus says, there is another kind of suffering which will literally never have a termination point.

The thought of it is too much to bear for some, as you see with the quotes from Pinnock and Stott, above. But would Stott and Pinnock still tremble when reflecting upon the suffering of those in Hell and individuals such as Sergio Aguiar (the man mentioned in the above story)? This is a man who mercilessly and savagely stomped his 2 year old son's tiny body until it was beyond recognition; the justice for something like that will literally never be filled up. I charge that those who deny the eternity of Hell minimize a) God's hatred of sin and b) the heinousness of sin. To devalue these two things is the only way to make a temporal hell make any sense (not even allowing for the overwhelming Biblical testimony which others are better equipped to deal with).

So which is it, annihilationists? Is Aguiar's crime not nearly as bad as I say it is, or am I simply not being understanding enough? In Heaven, I will not shed any tears for Aguiar, but I wish I could muster up some today, while my feet are still on the ground. They simply aren't coming.

Appalling!!

I have never been so appalled in my entire life. To get the full weight of this, you need to watch the video to the end.

Assessing The Decline of Protestantism

According to a new report by US News & World Reports, we Protestants are going to eventually become the minority. "Whereas nearly two thirds of Americans identified themselves as Protestant as recently as the 1980s, only 51 percent identify as Protestant today, the study found." Really? Going to be a minority? I'm a Protestant, and I'm pretty sure that I've always been in the minority of American religion. Ever since I took my evangelism class with Josh Walker at GCU and read my way through The Purpose Driven Life per my teacher's requirements, I have known that "true" Protestant religion stopped being cool a long time ago. Sure, really cool guys like Josh and I are fighting to make it society's standard for awesome once again; but swimming upstream like this takes time.

"American religion is likely to be even more diverse in the future than it is now," John Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum, told reporters. "One can make the case that Americans will be less Protestant and less Christian a century from now, but how much is hard to gauge."

Darn. And I was used to being in the majority! I thought that the "seeker sensitive" churches with their broad and appealing approach were supposed to save Christianity in America. Oh well; I suppose the next trendy approach to butchering historical Christianity should get its chance to try out the spotlight. Go ahead, Emergents; you give it a try.

One really interesting piece of information: "Thirty percent of all Americans, it found, have switched their religion at some point in their lifetime, either to a different religion or to an 'unaffiliated status.'" For those living in Rio Linda, unaffiliated means, "I believe what I want about God and no religious group is going to tell me what He's like. This is becoming very popular, but lets remember that this trend started long before Meno Simon ever picked up a New Testament and decided those creeds were completely worthless.

I want to remind our readers here at Bring The Books that we are in a struggle for the hearts and minds of those around us; of our communities. Significant threats are not only on the horizon, but already here. First, Roman Catholicism; as more and more immigrants come here from Latin countries, so too does the Roman religion come along with them. Second, Islam; though not something I have to deal with, living here in the Bible belt, it is nonetheless a worldview threat which we must all be educated on and prepared to offer a defense against (with love and respect). Finally, generic unbelief; judging from this study from US News & World Reports, massive numbers of people are turning from religion altogether or labeling themselves "atheistic" or "agnostic."

I want to also make a passing observation that these figures from USN&WR makes one presumption which we should not accept; and that assumption is that the trends will continue as they are right now. If history offers us one lesson it is that trends change. What pollster could have predicted the Great Awakening, for example? The opportunity for spiritual revival and a resurgence of interest in the true Biblical faith is there, and that is something which polls cannot predict, because our God is sovereign.

Though election and predestination are both true, we as Reformed Christians know that we have a responsibility to present the Gospel and to leave unbelievers "without an excuse." "How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14). After all; would the Great Awakening have ever happened if Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley had not spread the Truth of God throughout the colonies? I would suggest not. I would also suggest that we each take personal stock of each of these major competing worldviews I have pointed out and ask ourselves whether we are adequately prepared to defend "the faith once delivered" against unbelief in its many forms.