Christ and Discontinuity

Peter Leithart reflects on the Sanhedrin’s horror at Jesus’ statement that he would destroy and then rebuild the temple.  While he was referring to his body, they took it as an offense against the center of their religious life.  Rather than wanting a God who claims this power,
They want a god of guarantees, whose entire [...]

John Piper: Rejoice over the reach of world Christianity, but don’t be complacent

From his recent sermon, The Legacy of Antioch:

Meet the Global South
Let’s review the situation of the world today in regard to the spread of Christianity, and what this new term Global South means. The Global South refers to the astonishing growth of the Christian church in Africa, Latin America, and Asia while the formerly dominant [...]

Justin Martyr before the prefect of Rome

Through reading Litfin’s Getting to Know the Church Fathers, I found out that the short narrative of Justin’s martyrdom is online at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, maintained by Calvin College.  Justin and others were arrested in Rome about AD 165.  The prefect (chief magistrate) of Rome first ordered Justin to sacrifice to the gods [...]

“Emerging adults” and Liberal Theology

Peter Leithart comments on the end of Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition.  Here is his full post:
Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts.  Demerath writes, that the [...]

The Image-Bearer’s farewell: The letters of Ignatius of Antioch

Ignatius, bishop of Antich, wrote 7 letters on his way to be martyred in Rome, addressed to his friend Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and to the churches in Rome, Ephesus, Tralles, Smyrna, Philadelphia, and Magnesia.  He appears to have died as a martyr around AD 110.  In each letter, he refers to himself as “Theophorus,” [...]

Ignatius of Antioch writes to the Ephesians

I thought that these were some beautiful words from Ignatius to the Ephesians, describing their union to God in Christ and urging them to both pray for those outside the faith and model Christ for them:
But I have learned that certain people from elsewhere have passed your way with evil doctrine, but you did not [...]

New Calvinism and Holy Hip Hop

I just finished listening to a 9Marks Audio installment where Mark Dever interview Christian hip hop artists shai linne and Voice.  I’ve heard shai linne’s “Atonement Q&A” before; it’s something like a rap catechism that’s part of his album “The Atonement.”  Shai and Voice are both theologically Reformed, and they view their work as a [...]

“Emerging Adults” and Religion

Christianity Today’s Katelyn Beaty interviewed sociologist Christian Smith for the current issue.  Smith’s new book, Souls in Transition,  looks at the religious attitudes and practices of 18-29 year-olds.  The idea that this phase of life is now a prelude to married life has come out in several things that I’ve read.  Some good examples are [...]

Book Review: Divided by Faith, by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith

Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America is a historical and sociological study of white evangelical attitudes toward white-black relations.  I found it fascinating.  I should also try to read some reviews by trained sociologists who may be able to offer some insight into their research methods.
Emerson and Smith state [...]

The European Heritage of Zionism

I’ve been episodically reading David Engel’s Zionism in Pearson’s “Short Histories of Big Ideas” series.  It seems like a good, fair, and readable introduction to the topic.
He distinguishes Zionism from “activist messianism.”  The latter, a religious movement,  grew in the 16th and 17th centuries and resulted in migration to Palestine in the 18th and 19th [...]

Expositional Preaching Crosses Cultural Boundaries

Recently, I posted some reflections on preaching in the African-American church.
Yesterday, I listened to Thabiti Anyabwile’s talk on expositional preaching in non-white contexts (you can find the audio here).  Late in the talk, he broadened non-white to “subcultural.”  He said that there is a conception that expositional preaching (where the preacher focuses on explaining the [...]

2 Clement: A Call to Repentance and Holy Living

While it’s traditionally called the “Second Letter of Clement,” Michael Holmes notes that it’s neither by Clement nor a letter.  2 Clement is actually a sermon or some other kind of address, the first complete Christian sermon outside of the New Testament.  The author and date are difficult to establish, although Holmes discusses some interesting [...]

Reaching the Next Generation With Substance, Not Style

Kevin DeYoung, pastor at University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan, did a series this week on his five-part plan for “reaching the next generation” with Christ: “Grab them with passion.  Win them with love.  Hold them with holiness.  Challenge them with truth.  Amaze them with God.”  The focus of the series is this: substance [...]

Kevin DeYoung on Church Membership

Kevin DeYoung has a good post on the importance of church membership.  It’s worth reading.  Here are his main points:
1. In joining a church you make visible your commitment to Christ and his people.
2. Making a commitment makes a powerful statement in a low-commitment culture.
3. We can be overly independent.
4. Church membership keeps us accountable.
5. [...]

Four Reformed Views of Christ and Culture

Kevin DeYoung links to an article by Ray Pennings about how four different Reformed camps think about the ancient question of Christian engagement in culture.  It’s short but interesting.  I’m a little surprised by the names that Pennings gives to the camps, but it looks like he explains them in a print-edition only article of [...]

Helping a Preacher Preach

Two weeks ago, my fiancée and I went to a Missionary Baptist Church in Kankakee, Illinois, where I live and work.  I’ve been to predominantly black churches before, but this time I heard something that I had not before: the pastor of the church and the guest preacher both talked a bit about the role [...]

Constitution Day 2009 Speech: “The Presidency in the Constitution”

Our school has a Constitution Day celebration every Sept. 17.  I’ve given a brief speech for our 2007, 2008, and 2009 ceremonies.  I thought that I would post them here, too.  This was the one that I gave today:
Our past three presidents have inspired both intense devotion from their admirers and intense condemnation from their [...]

Pentecostalism in Latin America

Milton Acosta of Biblical Seminary of Colombia in Medillín gives his readers an introduction to the trends in Latin American Pentecostalism.  He says that churches are often disconnected from either Catholicism or Protestantism and the pastors often get theology degrees from an unregulated degree market.  There are also trends of “Protestant shamanism” and the prosperity [...]

Principles for Worship

Multnomah University professors Brad Harper and Paul Louis Metzger discuss principles for worship, based on John D. Witvliet’s Worship Seeking Understanding.  The one that spoke most to me was their third principle:
Integrating liturgy and culture requires us to be critical of our own cultural context. Worship leaders need to critique the culturally generated worship [...]

A Revival in Liberal Theology?

I wouldn’t really recommend watching the entire Bill Moyers Journal panel discussion with Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary president Serene Jones, and Union professor Gary Dorrien (video and transcript here).  They talk about the economic crisis in the ways that you might expect three liberal theologians to talk: a lot about how greed got us [...]

Book Review: “Black and Tan” by Douglas Wilson

While looking at Doug Wilson’s blog one day, I happened to notice that he wrote a book on slavery and culture wars.  Black and Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America seemed to be a great book to pair with America’s God, since both books discuss 19th-century American Christianity.
The story [...]

Book Review: Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

My first response to Noll’s work is to express my appreciation and respect for the amount of research and expertise that went into writing America’s God.  Noll has a tremendous grasp of the different theological traditions of 18th- and 19th-century America, and displays impressive familiarity with the broader history of the United States in the [...]

Lincoln Bests the Theologians

The last major chapter of America’s God compares the subtlety and humility of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865 with the way that theologians talked about the Civil War, which Noll finds predictable and self-righteous.  Noll writes that while American theologians in the mid-19th century often believed that they could interpret God’s sovereign will [...]

The free market and American Christianity

In my last post, I summarized Mark Noll’s (America’s God) belief that American evangelicals in the early 19th century generally accepted the developing free market, which brought great economic and social change to the new U.S.  I thought that Noll’s fuller explanation deserved an extended quote:
European Protestants, who for the most part maintained the ideal [...]

The tricky balance between evangelism and social justice

Matt Harmon of Grace Theological Seminary posted “ten theses for further discussion” from his talk about the relationship between the kingdom of God and social justice.  You can find them here and here.  This is something that I’m quite interested in.   Here are some that I thought were particularly well-said:
2. We must allow biblical and [...]

Interview With Chinese House Pastor

Christianity Today also published Rob Moll’s short interview with the pastor of a Chinese urban house church in May 2008.  His answers to two questions emphasize some important themes that have come out in the small amount of reading that I’ve done on Chinese Christianity:
What do everyday Chinese think about Christianity?
The people in China are [...]

Rob Moll’s Portrait of Chinese Christianity

Christianity Today editor at large Rob Moll gives a general history of the modern Chinese church in this article from May 2008.  Like some of the other articles that I’ve read on this subject, Moll describes the repression of the Cultural Revolution and the massacre in Tiananmen Square as important points for the Chinese church.  [...]

Oldest Surviving Bible Now Online

From Reuters:
The surviving parts of the world’s oldest Bible were reunited online Monday, generating excitement among scholars striving to unlock its mysteries.
The Codex Sinaiticus was hand-written by four scribes in Greek on animal hide, known as vellum, in the mid-fourth century around the time of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great who embraced Christianity.
Not all [...]

What will Hu Jintao’s trip to Italy mean for Chinese Catholics?

Francesco Sisci, author of the piece on Catholicism in China that I blogged about last month, wrote in the Asia Times Online (the article was published on July 1):
Next week, Hu Jintao starts an official visit to Italy, the first for a Chinese president in 10 years. As with his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, Hu will [...]

Influences on American theology: republicanism, commonsense morality, and the market

Noll now explores the changes in American theology that came after independence.  Noll believes that the new, republican order that overturned the religious and social establishments of the colonial period needed new institutions, and the expanding evangelical churches provided just that.  See this post for my summary of his explanation.
Chapter 11 of America’s God shows [...]