Audio Alert

Last day to buy the ESV MP3s at reduced price.

For some free audio, checkout D.A. Carson's messages from this last weekend at the Bible Church of Little Rock. He spoke on Matt 11:2-19, Rev 4, and Rev 5.

OK All You Canadians...

Do you buy what this article is selling?

On Sale until Feb 28--Downloadable ESV MP3 Bibles

Just saw this over at the ESV Bible Blog.

Complete Bible $39.95 (Reg $49.95)
Old Testament $27.95 (Reg $34.95)
New Testament $15.95 (Reg $19.95)
Psalms & Proverbs $4.95 (Reg $5.95)
Gospels $9.95 (Reg $11.95)

The Emergent Church make the pages of the Wall Street Journal

This article provides more fluff than substance, but it seems to indicate that these views are becoming more prevalent in the church.

At least they quoted Al Mohler.

Have You Been Following This?

This post from Tom Ascol at the Founders blog has generated about 65,000 words worth of comments. It's an interesting post about who would make a good SBC president, but has morphed into a heated exchange between certain SBC factions.

iMonk, BTW, has a multi-part companion series to this that is worth a read.

There's so much that could be said about this, and I don't have the time right now, so I'll just ask this question (by way of observation, not indictment). If Reformed Baptists, Sovereign Grace Charismatics, and Presbyterians can set aside their differences to be "Together for The Gospel," can those in the SBC do the same?

I Always Knew It Would Come to This

I took the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz, and this was the result:

You are An Expendable Character (Redshirt)

Since your accomplishments are seldom noticed, and you are rarely thought of, you are expendable. That doesn't mean your job isn't important but if you were in Star Trek you would be killed off in the first episode you appeared in.


Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz


(HT: Good Brownie)

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Note: This was the best I could do, Buggy. The formatting was messing up my blog, and since I was a Red Shirt anyway, who cares what other characters I could have been.

Oh, & a big Ka'pla to William Dicks, you lucky Klingon devil!

Equal Time

In my last post, I highlighted a WSJ article that reminded me of some of iMonk's confessional pieces. I responded in a comment to him, and I'll say it here, too: I find some of his posts very helpful. So in the spirit of equal time, here's an example.

For Valentine's Day, he wrote a piece about Romantic Love. Here's his opening statement:
As best I can tell, romance is our poor imitation version of the love of God that is ours in the Gospel; a kind of minor league salvation story for people who need to be “saved” from being alone and unloved.

Wham! How's that for an in-your-face assessment?

Now, we need to define terms here. I'm using the traditional definition of Romantic love (the one I learned in Integrated Humanities), the same one Shakespeare talks about. I'm hoping he's talking about the same one, because if not, I'm putting my foot in my mouth.

Nevertheless, I think I'm on safe ground, because he goes on to mention Shakespeare himself. I like how he puts it here, when he compares Romeo's soliloquies to Fifty Cent's lyrics:
...the contemporary version gives a far purer version of what is really going on. When the veneer of piety is removed, the truer version of romance . . . remains.

Next, he talks about marriage counseling, and makes this observation:
Even if I were to hand them over to a relationship counselor of the highest order, if he were not a God-centered counselor, there would be cracks in the new foundation.

Further, I believe that if I send them down the path of resurrecting romance as our culture understands it, I will have diminished the greatest capacity for experiencing the joy of marriage: the personal experience of the love of God in the Gospel. I will have signed on to a cultural ritual where Christ is not Lord, and the highest goals are reached with no reference to Jesus. Without Jesus, we do not know if we have climbed a step-ladder or an Alp.

He's moving in the same direction I would, which is that there is a distinction between romantic love and Godly love. (BTW, in Greek, the distinction is plain, because they have different words for love. In English, we use the word "love" in different ways, like "I love coffee," or "I love my wife," but it would be better and easier to understand if I had different words.)

I won't get into his Q&A--you can read it if you'd like. And I'm not going to say that I agree with everything he writes here (which doesn't really mean anything, because I've yet to find anyone that I agree with on everything).

But instead of quibbling about details, I'd rather affirm his point in the main: Romantic love (love as our society sees it), is complete bosh, and worthless when put up against the surpassing greatness of God's love for us.

Spritual Memoirs

Does this remind you of anyone?

***
02/18/06 Update
Ok, I guess it wasn't very obvious. This is who I had in mind.

test

I took the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz, and this was the result:

Your results:
You are An Expendable Character (Redshirt)
Since your accomplishments are seldom noticed,
and you are rarely thought of, you are expendable.
That doesn't mean your job isn't important but if you
were in Star Trek you would be killed off in the first
episode you appeared in.

An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 75% Geordi LaForge 55% Deanna Troi 50% Spock 47% Will Riker 45% Beverly Crusher 45% Jean-Luc Picard 45% Uhura 45% Data 41% James T. Kirk (Captain) 40% Worf 30% Chekov 30% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 25% Mr. Scott 20% Mr. Sulu 0%

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz


(HT: Good Brownie)

Miscellaneous

Does anyone else besides me find Doxo's new picture um, disturbing? It freaks me out. On the Creepy Scale, I give it a 9.5. For reference, the Centuri0n's Angry Eybrow would be about a 7, and the gleeful father watching his son bleed would be a 10.

In other news, has anyone been watching men's Curling in the Olympics? I hear I have a twin on the US team. Couldn't find a picture, but if someone has seen it, let me know.

Finally, in honor of Valentine's Day, one of my favorite passages on love:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm,
for love is strong as death,
jealousy is fierce as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,
the very flame of the Lord.

Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.

If a man offered for love
all the wealth of his house,
he would be utterly despised.

(Song of Solomon 8:6-7, ESV)

How God Speaks

My response to this post.

God doesn't speak to us anymore like He did in the OT.

Is that surprising? It shouldn't be. This is exactly the point made by the opening lines of the book of Hebrews:

"Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature..." (Heb 1:1-3a, ESV).

His Son came as His final revelation...to fulfill all the of things only hinted at in the OT. We don't need prophets because we have the one of whom they prophesied; we no longer need a human high priest because we have a heavenly one; we are no longer subject to the law because it has fulfilled it's job as our tutor, to lead us to Christ.

Sudoku: The Next Generation (from today's Wall Street Journal)

Unfortunately, I don't have time to play Sudoku any more, in part because I'm too busy blogging, so I suppose it's fitting that I blog about Sudoku.

Is God an Accident of Evolution? The Next Step in Evolutionary Theory (Al Mohler)

This article by Al Mohler is about Paul Bloom, a Psych professor at Yale who posits that the reason for widespread belief in God is evolutionary in nature. I didn't read the Atlantic Monthly article, but I did read a piece that included Bloom's work in the Wall Street Journal a couple of months back.

Of particular note is this quote near the end of the article:
"Given his worldview, Paul Bloom would have us to recognize that we have outgrown the idea of God and that human beings should embrace a secular and scientific worldview, leaving the infantile residue of evolution behind."

I hope to tackle this prevailing "wisdom" among scientists in a post in the near future.

QOTW--Why do you Blog?

Question for the week: Why are you Blogging?

Evan May presents a cautionary post on blogging. He warns against two extremes...self-serving blogging on the one hand, and creating your own personal para-church organization on the other. I particularly appreciate his idea about inadvertantly bringing judgment upon yourself by assuming a teaching role, particularly for someone who is unprepared to teach.

But I wonder...are there more options than just these two extremes?

So my question for you is, why do you blog?

As for me, I'm still trying to answer that question. I think I want my blog to include theology, but between Evan's post and this one from Jerry Wragg, I'm beginning to wonder what it is I'm even doing out here.

This Frightens Me

Hope to be back later today with the question of the week.

In the meantime, if you have a little time, read this. This is frightening to me, because I know some people who I think are on their way down the exact same path.

Note: if original link doesn't work, please try the Google Cache.

#ProsApologian

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm addicted to #Pros chat. I finally bit the bullet and figured out how to tune in, and now I can't tune out.

If you want to try it, you can check it out here. For an idea of what you'll see when you get there, see this and this.

Virus Coming

This came through from our tech guys yesterday. Make sure your virus software is updated!

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There is a new virus scheduled to execute on February 3rd. Links to more info;
MSNBC
Microsoft
McAfee
Norton
Trend Micro