Welcome to the SharperIron Blogroll.
The Blogroll is a collection of blogs that are often of interest and help to SI readers. SharperIron does not create the content of these blogs and the views expressed in them are those of their respective writers.
Most people assume that empathy is always virtuous. Two recent DG articles explain how empathy can be sinful:
1. Dodds, Abigail. “The Beauty and Abuse of Empathy: How Virtue Becomes a Tyrant.” Desiring God, 14 April 2020.
Dodds explains three ways to distort or abuse empathy:
2. Rigney, Joe. “Do You Feel My Pain? Empathy, Sympathy, and Dangerous Virtues.” Desiring God, 2 May 2020.
Abstract: Empathy has become a more recognized and applauded virtue in recent decades—so much so that many now count it superior to...
I recently teamed up with my friend Jonathan Leeman to write both a book and an article on politics, conscience, and the church:
New Book (Crossway)
Leeman, Jonathan, and Andrew David Naselli. How Can I Love Church Members with Different Politics? 9Marks: Church Questions. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020. (63 pp.)
[Update on 9/2/2020: The book is available for free as an...
I recently moderated a panel on the millennium:
The title of the panel is “The Millennial Maze,” which misled many people at the conference to assume the panel would be about millennials!
The panel was part of the Bethlehem College & Seminary Conference for Pastors + Church Leaders and took place on February 4, 2020.
Here’s how I introduce the three panelists:
9Marks just published my review of Rebekah Merkle’s Eve in Exile: And the Restoration of Femininity (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2016).
It’s not so much a critical review as it is a case for Christians to read it. I suggest four reasons:
When my eleven-year-old daughter, Kara, was reading the book, I asked her what she thought of the author.
Kara replied, “She writes like Doug Wilson.” (I had recently read Wilson’s story...
I contributed an article on divorce and remarriage to the latest issue of the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal:
Andrew David Naselli. “What the New Testament Teaches about Divorce and Remarriage.” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 24 (2019): 3–44.
Evangelicals hold three main views on divorce and remarriage:
I argue for view 3b.
Here’s the outline:
1. Matthew 5:31–32 and 19:3–121.1. Jesus Permits but Does Not Require Divorce for Πορνεία
1.2. Remarriage Is Always Legitimate When the Divorce Was Legitimate...
There are currently no items in this feed.
There are currently no items in this feed.
“Flatten the curve,” “slow the spread,” “we’re all in this together,” “social-distancing,” “mask-up”—all of these phrases were not in our vocabulary at the start of 2020, but here we are with a whole new set of buzz words. COVID-19 has rocked the world like a devastating global earthquake. Everyone has needed to adjust their way of life and way of working.
A leader’s ability to respond wisely to the ever-changing world in which they minister determines the effectiveness of the organization they lead. This has been made abundantly clear through the challenges of COVID-19. At IBL we have the dual challenge of adapting our own organization and its ministries even as we simultaneously come alongside leaders and organizations who are drastically adapting their ministries. We are responding in a number of important ways.
Engaging our International Partners. One of the biggest challenges we have faced is in our International Training ministries. Thus far we’ve needed to postpone four international training conferences due to COVID-19 traveling restrictions. The multitude of...
Our first engagement with IBL was sixteen years ago. Through that process and in the years since, it has become abundantly clear that Father is using this ministry to do exactly what they state on their website: to overcome ministry barriers, discern God’s direction, and become as God desires. We at FiveStone Community Church have experienced all of these up close and personal as IBL has walked side-by-side with us through both very challenging situations as well as positive times of ministry.
We initially reached out to IBL during a very difficult and tumultuous time in the life of our church. I had followed the founding pastor of thirty-two years. After three years as the Senior Pastor, I began to lead the church through a relocation process. The concept and plan was initially embraced with enthusiasm and excitement. Our church had experienced rapid growth in the prior three years and the new location and associated ministry strategy would enable the church to continue reaching more young families.
During the relocation process it became evident that a small group of the leadership...
Last year I spoke with you about the need to grow our staff to serve the increasing number of leaders asking us for assistance. In this article I provide more details and a status report of the growth initiative we have undertaken. I also ask you to consider helping us reach our support goal.
The NeedThe reach and impact of IBL has expanded considerably since its founding in 1987. Our small staff and team of volunteers are now developing and encouraging leaders on every continent. Yet the need for equipping and supporting leaders both here in the U.S. and around the world continues to grow. For several years we have functioned at and beyond our capacity, yet all of us sense that God wants us to do more.
Our heart is to broadly impact
the next generation of ministry leaders
by becoming the preferred organization
for ministry leadership
and ministry-team development.
This desire is not spurred by self-aggrandizement but by a Holy-Spirit-given burden to make a real difference in the lives and ministries of God’s leaders across the US and around the world....
In this vlog series Dr. David Deets and Dawn Phelan discuss the reasoning behind irritation that arise when things don’t go the way we planned.
I recently read an excerpt from Paul Wolfe’s My God Is True! which provides an encouraging reminder of the importance and power of patient, long-term faithfulness in preaching the Word. Wolfe encourages preachers not to seek to “wow” our hearers with something novel and life-changing every week, but instead to nourish people with line-upon-line exposition […]
The post Brick by Brick: The Lasting Benefits of Expository Preaching appeared first on Church Works Media.
Pastor Alex Montoya has ministered in the inner city of Los Angeles for almost 50 years. In his book Preaching with Passion he addresses the need of the pastor to proclaim the Word of God with zeal, not a dry, cold stoicism. Chapter 3 urges the pastor to “Preach with Compassion,” and it ends with this moving testimony […]
The post People Need the Lord appeared first on Church Works Media.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Herman Bavinck’s fame as a theologian has been steadily growing in my circles—especially since the Dutch Translation Society began putting out his Reformed Dogmatics in English in 2003. All four volumes sit proudly on my own shelves along with the first volume of his Reformed Ethics.
I like to know the stories and circumstances of my theologians. I like to know what concerns drove them, what conversations they found themselves in. And this book delivers. It’s not a warm-hearted book (more on that in a moment), but it reads as eminently careful. The footnotes and the discussions very strongly suggest that Eglinton has made himself the master of Bavinck’s writings—in Dutch, no less. He is a servant to Bavinck, not a lord: he helps readers of today understand who Bavinck was in his own mind and in his own times.
This is about to be the squishiest criticism I’ve ever given of a book, the most subjective: I did feel that Bavinck failed to come alive for me in...
This blog has shifted over time to reflect the interests of its proprietor. I use it as much as a “weblog”—a journal of my own thoughts, a means of forming those thoughts—as I do anything else. I search my own blog all the time for quotes and illustrations to use in other writing.
But I want to serve you, my readers (one of whom told me years ago that the “both of you readers” joke is old, so I won’t use it here). So tell me what you want me to talk about. What brings you here? Are you okay with what this blog has become, or do you want it to return to the days when it had more Bible tech tips—like Unicode tutorials?
What else would you like me to talk more about? Maybe language? Worldview?
What would you like me to talk less about? Maybe the KJV…? I want to know!
An ex-evangelical acquaintance of mine recently posted a link to an academic journal article critiquing inerrantist biblical scholars. It contained this paragraph:
Well, turnabout is fair play, especially with insufferably tendentious arguments. (I’m sorry: I believe in graciousness, I do, but there’s got to be some room for “hating…with perfect hatred” those who hate God a la Psalm 139:22. My blood boils when I see supercilious ex-evangelical patronization of those like me who still ardently cling to Christ.)
The same distinction operates within the realm of secular academic biblical studies practices. Not all kinds of academic activity involve specialized intellectual practices, even if they do involve less systematized or less deliberately maintained beliefs about proper methodology and other matters. It is thus significant to note that non-inerrantist academic biblical studies practices are specialized discursive actions. This finding can orient relevant sociological expectations: Only certain kinds of people in certain kinds of social and economic settings will have both the ability and the interests to participate in such...
A brand new book I wrote this past year, Basics for a Biblical Worldview has just been released. It’s a sixth grade biblical worldview textbook for BJU Press. For this project I was privileged to rejoin as a freelancer the team I was on at BJU Press for nine years, the Biblical Worldview Team. I really need to underline that I didn’t write this book like I wrote Authorized; that book was an individual effort while this one was decidedly a team effort. For this new book I wrote according to a theological vision provided by the gifted friends and mentors I worked with and under at BJU Press. I wrote according to an outline and a set of careful lesson objectives that was already prepared by that experienced and excellent team. One insight they had that felt exactly right to me was that identity issues needed to get a lot more attention than they did a number of years back when we planned and produced a twelfth grade book on biblical worldview. In this new book we also spent...
I regularly get questions just like this:
Mark, I am thankful for your book Authorized, which I recently finished. I currently pastor a church that is KJV-Only and I am personally reviewing that position for myself and in the future of possibly leading the church in a different direction. I have not yet come to a fully formulated position but I am getting closer each day. I know that you have purposefully avoided the textual side of the debate, but would you have any other resources (articles, books) that you have written or would recommend on that topic? I would greatly appreciate any guidance there. Thank you for the blog and work you are doing. May God bless. Thank you. —X.
So I’ve written a standard reply to send. Here goes!
First: thank you! Thank you for reaching out and for your kind words. I have indeed purposefully avoided the textual debate on my YouTube channel and in direct conversation with my KJV-Only brothers. I’ve done this because the Bible (it seems to me) is far clearer on the principle that “edification requires intelligibility” (1 Cor 14) than it is on the textual...
There are currently no items in this feed.
