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The Danger of Christian Worldview
I have a lot of interest in Christian worldview. From a strictly financial, personal perspective, that interest has carried a hefty price tag (the cost of my degree in Apologetics and Worldviews). Let this cost alone speak for me: I am an advocate of a Christian worldview. But I also believe that there is a danger associated with a Christian…
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James Orr: Pioneer in Weltanschuuang
As David Naugle explains in his book Worldview: The History of a Concept, James Orr stands as a pioneer in using the concept of Weltanschuuang to commend the Christian faith. Orr recognized something that many of his peers didn’t—that fighting with secular ideologies over particular truth claims was not gaining ground for the reason that these…
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Preaching with Style: Advice from Strunk and White
I’ll admit that my title was a bit of click-bait. I don’t mean “style” in the sense of flair or fashion, but in the sense intended by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White in their little book The Elements of Style. In the final chapter “An Approach to Style,” Strunk and White discuss the…
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How to Prepare Sermons: John Stott’s Six Steps
The task of preaching God’s Word remains a constant challenge and joy to me. One of the books that has most shaped my approach to preparation is John Stott’s Between Two Worlds. In particular, his chapter “Preparing Sermons” provides a roadmap for the journey from Scripture text to delivering the sermon. Stott concedes that sermon…
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The Pillar and Support of the Truth
Imagine Timothy–the Apostle Paul’s son in the faith, and young pastor of the church in Ephesus–walking through his city on an errand. Maybe he’s paying a tax, or getting supplies to a widow. Wherever he’s going, there’s a sight in Ephesus he couldn’t possibly overlook. Dominating the view of the Ephesus is a massive temple—the Artemision.…
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How Is God Beautiful? An Answer from Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards emphasizes an aspect of God’s nature that most systematic theologies barely mention: the beauty of God. But what exactly does it mean that God is beautiful? This is a question that Edwards explores in his work The Nature of True Virtue. Edwards realized that there was a kind of beauty in virtue, yet a beauty of…
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Christians and Transcendental Meditation
Last Wednesday Katy Perry, Sting, and Jerry Seinfeld got together for a little shindig in Carnegie Hall. The point of the event? As the New York Times put it, “To raise money for the David Lynch Foundation, which the film director has devoted to spreading the word on [Transcendental Meditation],” often abbreviated as T.M. According to…
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What Is the Future of Libraries?
I used two libraries in the same day. One was a seminary library. When I arrived, the door was locked and the lights were off. I meandered down a hallway and found someone in an office who sheepishly let me in and turned on the lights. The lights illumined the rows and rows of books.…
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The Pastor as Public Theologian
My first encounter with Kevin Vanhoozer came when I read his article “Theology and Apologetics” in the New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics. I found myself deeply stirred by his statement that “we need a biblically informed shape of community life fully to see, and to taste, the wisdom of God in a consistent and compelling manner.” He closes his…
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The God of Ecclesiastes
It is deeply ingrained in our intuition that there is some kind of deity out there—a higher power that is responsible for much of what we see and experience. Recently, a study at the University of Oxford concluded that “human thought processes were ‘rooted’ to religious concepts.” (This study came with a price tag of £1.9 million…
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Jonathan M. Threlfall 