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This Week’s Web

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Metaxes Bonhoeffer ObamaA Critical Review of Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer
I have bought Metaxas to read it, and have heard that it is not an unbiased biography. This review is especially pointed. For links to other critical reviews go here.

Which Bonhoeffer biography would you recommend?

5 Things You Might Not Know about “Bossy”
There has been some controversy in recent weeks about the way this word gets used, including a call that it be banned with reference to women and girls. Dictionary.com illuminates the word with some interesting historical insights. I did not know that cows were called bossy. I have heard them called Bessy, and I guess the latter is a derivation from the former.

I am interested to see that a common contemporary use of “boss” echoes a mid-eighteenth century usage where it meant mastery of something. My son-in-law uses it often like that: “He is the Boss (= he is the Best).” When it comes to playing guitar, for example, I reckon my son-in-law is The Boss (apologies to Bruce Springsteen).

This Week’s Web

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Japan's Ice Waterfall FestivalHere’s a couple of sites I found interesting or fun. As a Perth lad, I simply cannot imagine the kind of cold that makes for a Japanese Ice Waterfall Festival.
Amazing pictures though.

The question of the historical Adam continues to heat up. Alister McGrath gives a sound-byte version of his understanding of the historicity or otherwise of Adam and Eve. John Piper insists that Adam must be understood as a historical person created by God, otherwise the Adam – Christ analogy in Romans 5 utterly collapses. Peter Enns disagrees, and John Walton gives a sound-byte version of how to understand Genesis 1.

 

 

This Week’s Web

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The Benefits of Reading BooksReal Book or eBook – which do you prefer?
Info-graphic: Top Ten Reasons for Choosing a Paper Book over an eBook.
Is my bias showing?

More on The Benefits of Reading Books

 Postliberal or Post-Liberal?
An interesting post on a distinction I was unaware of.

Fringe Environmentalists Declare War on Humanity?
“Declaring war on humans won’t make for a cleaner planet. To the contrary, the green misanthropes harm the cause by undermining environmentalism’s good public standing. It’s time for responsible environmentalists to push the anti-humanists back to the movement’s fringe, where they belong.”

Heated Rhetoric

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AP Summer 2013AP ramped up the rhetoric for the cover of a recent edition of their magazine. “New Battle for the Bible” and “Hymn Wars” were advertised as two of the feature articles in the issue. The byline for the main article was even more dramatic: “Battle for the Bible: Christians Must Defend Inerrancy or Watch the Church Die.”

This kind of language is a call to arms, a rallying cry to gather the faithful remnant in the face of an apparently devastating threat. It plays to the anxieties and insecurities of the target audience, and also suggests the anxieties and insecurity of those making the call. Its aggression issues perhaps from the dictum that the best form of defence is attack. But it goes on the attack by simplifying and polarising the issue and the communities involved in it. One is either on our side or they are an enemy. One either agrees with our analysis of the situation or they are enemies of Christ.

I am troubled that our politicians so readily use this kind of argument; more troubling yet is that it is fostered in the church. While it may “work” in the short term, I doubt the long term fruitfulness of such an approach. When one has an argument to make, inflated rhetoric becomes unnecessary. Gordon Coleman’s article in the magazine is a case in point. Entitled “Out of Tune: Why a Debate Over a Hymn Proves Central to Christianity,” his essay is calm and measured, firmly presenting his case with clarity and good grace. The rhetorical inflation on the cover to “Hymn Wars” was simply unnecessary and inflammatory.

I think we can do better than this.

This Week’s Web

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The Shortest Commentary Ever on the Whole Bible

Ben Myer’s recently wrote the shortest commentary ever on the whole bible: one tweet for every book of the Bible, including the Deutero-canonicals. It’s fun and quirkly, and sometimes just hits the spot. For example:

Ruth: He wakes Bluebird Cartoonin the night to find a woman, a foreigner, touching his feet. He rubs his eyes. He had been dreaming of kings.

3 John: Oh my dear friend, I need to see you face to face to tell you what love means. Love can’t be sent by mail.

 

 

The Art of Confession

Michael Jensen has an interesting post on Confession at the ABC’s Religion and Ethics blog. Here is an excerpt:

“The second observation is this: because we hate to confess what are really like and to admit to what we have done, we live in a kind of inauthentic state. We perform our lives in public as carefully edited versions of our true selves. Partly this is because, at times, even we are at a loss to fathom our own actions. We feel that we sometimes are not truly ourselves, so we say “I was drunk” or “I was in a fit of rage” or “I was seduced” or “I am addicted” – which are all ways in which we separate ourselves, ever so slightly, from our actions. But who are we if we are not what we have done?”

Important Advice from Scot McKnight for this Time of Year

Roger Olson identifies The Most Pernicious and Pervasive Heresy in [Western] Christianity

Science, Creation and Genesis

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BILL NYELast week’s “Great Debate” on the origins of life, the universe and everything has generated a small flurry of interest in evangelical circles. The Sydney Morning Herald, though, did not think much of the debate.

RJS (sorry, I don’t know her name, but she writes the science and faith posts over at Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed) has provided a useful annotated bibliography and some videos, for those interested in this debate and the authority of Scripture question that underlies it.