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.
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This week, Chris Anderson is traveling in Indonesia with two young families from the church he pastors who are praying, strategizing, and planning to move there. This excerpt from Gospel Mediations for Missions is a fitting thought for the occasion! “Why in the world do they do it?” I’ve often wondered what would motivate missionaries […]
The post For the Sake of His Name appeared first on Church Works Media.
During my theological training, I regularly heard challenges on the need to be exceptional for the glory of God. I was taught that excellence was a cardinal Christian virtue, which honestly did me a world of good. I heard that it is a sin to do less than your best. And so it is, though I […]
The post Jars of Clay: A Philosophy of Grace vs. Glory appeared first on Church Works Media.
When I was a kid, we would say (rather irreverently, I admit), “I swear on a stack of Bibles.” The meaning was as clear as “I swear on my mother’s grave”: The speaker was telling the truth—or at least wanted you to believe he was. If swearing on one Bible in a court of law […]
The post A Stack of Bibles appeared first on Church Works Media.
It’s natural for pastors to equate increasing numbers with ministry success. I’d like to challenge that idea a bit, beginning with an illustration from my own family. This summer I “married off” the oldest of my four daughters. When I finished walking my wife down the aisle, I whispered to her, “We did it.” I […]
The post Grow to Shrink appeared first on Church Works Media.
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A friend of mine is something of a seeker, entertaining and exploring Christian faith and often apparently inhabiting it—but still struggling in a move from darkness to light. That’s the best way I know how to describe him.
He wrote me an eloquent letter in which he used his training in philosophy to wonder out loud if Christianity is merely a set of Jungian archetypes, a set of myth-making stories that echo something deep in the human psyche that somehow over evolutionary millennia we have found useful. This is the way Jordan Peterson treats the biblical narrative, too.
He couldn’t bring himself to conclude that Jung and Peterson are right, but he had to work through their ideas nonetheless.
Here was my response.
You can play this game of spotting the True Truth underneath the mere stories until you are blue in the face—and blue in the spirit. Who’s to say that the materialist/scientistic viewpoints aren’t equally beholden to archetypes encoded by evolution into the human psyche over millennia? They aren’t “true,” just exceptionally and demonstrably useful for the survival and propagation of...
Free speech issues have made the news recently as political tensions rise—along with distrust in and fatigue with social media.
No one has helped me understand the issues at stake better than Stanley Fish. His Winning Arguments is very helpful, and this article from Fish on Mark Zuckerberg may whet your appetite for more Fish.
And if you need help appropriating Fish into a Christian framework, I’m your redheaded man.
Faithlife’s brand new Bible Study Magazine podcast, hosted by yours truly, launches today.
The first season of twelve episodes (four available today; one released per week after this) is focused on how to achieve and promote biblical literacy.
In the first episode, I talk to Kevin Vanhoozer about biblical illiteracy—and I manage to sneak in a reference to Stanley Fish.
Other episodes talk about the story of the Bible, canon, textual criticism, and other topics relevant to biblical literacy. My guests include Vern Poythress, Leland Ryken, Trevin Wax, Wendy Widder, Peter Gurry, and others.
(Just so you know: they didn’t tell me they were doing a photo shoot, and I don’t normally wear hats to work. I’m not that cool.)
I’m almost done with a year-long project writing a BJU Press Bible textbook on biblical worldview for sixth graders. I needed to quote a verse that helps them understand that Christians are called to live lives of practical good works for their neighbors. I turned to Titus 3:14. Here it is in the English Standard Version:
And let our people learn to devote themselves to good works, so as to help cases of urgent need, and not be unfruitful.
This comes in a list of short instructions. There isn’t really much immediate context to help us know what this means. It stands more or less on its own.
But I think I get it:
1. Christian people under Titus’ care should be told to dedicate themselves to doing good.
2. They’re supposed to look for cases of urgent need.
3. This way they can avoid being unfruitful.
Got all that?
Now what can you get out of the Elizabethan English of the King James Version? Same verse:
And let ours also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses, that they be not unfruitful.
1. Who is “ours”? I think this is a little difficult or obscure, but it’s not...
I work for a Christian publisher, and we have made Bibles of various kinds. If you could listen to our internal discussions, you would hear quickly that Crossway sets the standard for Bible publishing. More beautiful typography and more innovative editions have come from Crossway than from any other organization serving the Bible-reading public. The most popular post in the history of my blog is an implicit argument that the ESV’s market share among Bible readers has a lot to do with Crossway’s leadership in beauty and innovation.
Crossway has just come out with four more editions of the English Standard Version, all of them worthwhile and well-executed variations on existing ideas. I say: more makes me merrier. If the market is actually sustaining all these niche editions, that says something good about the market (as long as people are actually using these editions and not just sticking them on shelves—I pray they are).
Let’s take a look at each of the four new ESV editions.
1. The ESV Reader’s Bible, Six-Volume Set, with chapter and verse numbers...There are currently no items in this feed.
