What I Read Online – 09/19/2011 (p.m.)

• Alone Worth Celebrating – The Gospel Coalition Blog

  • • When you face how deep your need of God’s love is, you will celebrate grace.
    • When you celebrate grace, you will come to love the King of grace more deeply.
    • When you love the King of grace more deeply, you will get excited about the work of his kingdom of grace.
    • When you get excited about the work of the kingdom of grace, zeal for this kingdom will color the way you respond to the situations and relationships you face as you live in and lead the broken community that is the church.
    • And as you live with eyes that see the work of God’s kingdom of grace and a heart that loves it, you will give grace to those around you. In so doing, you will minister more faithfully, enthusiastically, and productively than you ever have before in the place where God has put you.

• Young-Earth and Old-Earth Creationism vs. Naturalism | Andy Naselli

  • In my view young-earth creationism is exegetically superior and scientifically viable and coherent. It’s possible, however, to err by overemphasizing the issue in a way that demonizes old-earth proponents and lumps them together with theistic evolutionists. The relative importance of something is extraordinarily important, and understatement can be much more convincing than overstatement. Some well-intentioned people use inflammatory rhetoric that overstates the importance of holding to young-earth creationism, and it needlessly pushes people away from the position.
  • Whatever his or her view of Genesis, therefore, the traditional Christian must embrace a robust and plausible theism that dares to test its claims against science and history. We believe that Phillip E. Johnson [a leader in the intelligent design movement] has been instrumental in creating a new way of looking at the old religion and science program. This helpful vision unites the traditionally religious; it does not divide them. It is our hope that old and young earth creationists can set aside their differences to implement that vision.

• The fourth “-tion” of preaching « Rob Morton

  • A good Bible lecture explains a passage, and what it means. A good Bible sermon explains a passage, what it means, and encourages and exhorts its hearers to respond to that message. But, may I add, a true-to-life Bible sermon will also show us how we can relate to and identify with real people in the Bible. They were struggling human beings, just like us. But their God, and ours, is great!

• Answer: “They Can’t” – Justin Taylor

  • Break it down into simple theo-logical propositions and it looks like this:

     

     
    1. No one can call upon Jesus if he doesn’t believe in Jesus.
    2. No one can believe Jesus or believe in Jesus if he hasn’t heard Jesus or heard of Jesus.
    3. No one can hear Jesus or hear of Jesus if no one preaches Jesus to him.
    4. No one can preach Jesus to the unreached unless he is sent.

• Rejecting the Genesis Account is Rejecting an Absolute God | in partibus infidelium (in the land of infidels)

  • It is true that this story of man’s fall is cast away as a relic of a mythological age by the average student of philosophy. But surely this is unjust. The question is not one merely of the historicity  of the book of Genesis. It is that, but it is also more than that. The whole philosophy of theism is involved in it. Anyone rejecting the Genesis narrative must also be prepared to reject the idea of an absolute God. The history includes the philosophy, and the philosophy includes the history.

     

    Cornelius Van Til, In Defense of the Faith, Vol. II: A Survey of Christian Epistemology, (P&R, no date), 22.

• Seeing the Implied Assertions in Art – Justin Taylor

  • Works of art make implied assertions, just as history and science and philosophy do. For convenience, we can say that the arts make implied claims about the three great issues of life:

     

     
    1. Reality: what really exists, and what is its nature?
    2. Morality: what constitutes right and wrong behavior?
    3. Values: what really matters, and what matters most and least?

• The Most Beautifully Written of All Children’s Books – Justin Taylor

  • The Wind in the Willows is surely the most beautifully written of all children’s books—it offers to the willing learner a deep course in the making of sentences. . . .

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.