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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.
I may now share a PDF of this article that released eighteen months ago in the Journal of Biblical Literature:
Andrew David Naselli. “Is Every Sin Outside the Body except Immoral Sex? Weighing Whether 1 Corinthians 6:18b Is Paul’s Statement or a Corinthian Slogan.” JBL 136 (2017): 969–87.
Here’s the abstract:
In 1 Cor 6:18b–c, Paul writes, “Every sin, whatever a person commits, is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.” This essay weighs whether 1 Cor 6:18b is Paul’s statement or whether Paul is quoting a Corinthian slogan, and it concludes that the second view is more plausible.
I recently micro-read this revised PhD dissertation:
Brian C. Collins. Scripture, Hermeneutics, and Theology: Evaluating Theological Interpretation of Scripture. Greenville, SC: Exegesis & Theology, 2012.
It’s outstanding. You can download a free PDF of the book here.
Brian Collins and I were PhD students together and were members of the same church. We used to spend the first half of each Saturday morning doing our Hebrew exegesis homework together for the upcoming week. Of all the students I took courses with, Brian is probably the most well-read.
Brian kindly agreed to answer some questions about his PhD dissertation.
1. What is TIS (Theological...
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I rise today to share some urgent advice with students of biblical counseling. My target audience are those students especially who are studying in College or Seminary as well as those who are learning in a number of church-based training centers. You are involved in an important study which you will find to be life changing, not only for those to whom you will be ministering in the counseling room someday, but for your own life as well. Diligence in your studies now will produce fruit you are not yet able to envision.
My advice for you is simple, but urgent. If you will take my admonition to heart and embrace my counsel, your studies will be enriched exponentially. Those who will heed my advice will quickly recognize the wisdom of my exhortation and will be rewarded with a renewed vigor for their studies.
Now, you may think I am over promising and that there is no advice or instruction I could offer that could possibly live up to my hype. Trust me, I wish I were articulate enough to make my case even stronger. If you will implement my simple guidance here, the benefits...
A soft answer turns away wrath.
But a foolish word stirs up anger.
Proverbs 15:1
Every time I read that Proverb, I think of Ping Pong.
“How’s that?”
Oh . . . it just seems to illustrate the principle in the proverb so well!
“Don’t get it.”
You see, many Proverbs are pictured principles of portable truth.
“What about Ping Pong?”
Oh! Here’s what I meant. One player slams a ball as hard as he can. What happens after that?
“Dunno.”
The other guy has to move away in order to receive it. It drives them farther apart.
“Yeah? And……?”
And if he slams one back just as hard, or harder, that separates them all the more.
“Sure.”
But if he simply answers the slam with a gentle return by merely holding his paddle still in receiving it, the ball barely goes back over the net and . . .
“and that draws them closer together.”
Right! So what’s the principle in the picture?
“Don’t slam people?”
I give up.
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In going through “Throwback Thursday” photos on Facebook recently, I came across this one. Thinking about it again today, I realized I’ve contrived my own version of “Let It Go”. Mismatched, out-of-season clothes…is that kid happy, loved, fed, modest, and relatively clean? Let it go. On Sundays, I get to pick what she wears, but she does her own styling the rest of the week. If I’m worried about it, it’s because others may think I’m a bad mom for not color coordinating everything, making sure it is a fashionable ensemble. It doesn’t matter. A decade from now, she won’t remember what she wore. Neither will I. She needs to be a kid.
ps This same principle applies to Pop Tarts for breakfast, school on the trampoline, homeschooling (or not), cloth diapers (or not), nursing your baby (or not), and a host of other things. Let other moms have the same latitude you need. Embrace and encourage your mom friends right where they are…because we all need that. Rest in what your own crazy normal looks like today, and help other moms who are wearily wielding their swords to find rest for their souls. It’s...
I read pretty much everything Alan Jacobs writes. This piece is at the top of the list of must-reads. It’s his assessment of the major storm between two conservatives: Sohrab Ahmari and David French.
Let me try to spin Jacobs’ basic argument into the way I would put it.
Insofar as liberal proceduralism is indeed on the rocks, and is serving mainly as an impolite fiction, a fig leaf covering progressive illiberalism, it’s bad and should be rejected along the Stanley Fishian why-we-can’t-all-just-get-along lines I’ve described on this blog many times before. (I loved Jacobs’ description of the backstory to one of the greatest essays in the history of the form—and the paragraph he quoted is the one I have practically memorized, I’ve repeated it to myself so often.)
Insofar as liberal proceduralism is the result of specifically Christian convictions about the inviolability of the conscience, and maybe even Reformed convictions about the necessity of...
I had only one class with Ron Horton, Aesthetics—and I had to drop it when my little daughter was born. But I listened to enough lectures to know that the man was brilliant, and I read and enjoyed his book, Mood Tides. I respected him greatly. He died—into new life—yesterday. And the greatest honor I can do him is to try to give his words another hearing.
I read the following essay as a freshman, I think, and didn’t get it. I read it much later, as an adult, and found it to be full of wisdom. I post it with permission from BJU Press in honor of Dr. Ronald Horton (1937–2019).
A Biblical Approach to Objectionable Elements Christian Educational CensorshipThis selection, used by permission, is an excerpt from Christian Education: Its Mandate and Mission.
Censorship in education is a controversial topic in both Christian schools and public schools. A Christian...
What first attracted me to Rebecca McLaughlin’s Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion was the title. I actually assumed it was a non-Christian book. Second was the author: I read a piece of hers on TGC that I liked. Third, to be honest, was that Crossway was willing to give me a free copy in exchange for an honest review, no strings attached.
So here I go: McLaughlin is easy to read, has done some good homework, has a compelling personal story, and writes with a British accent so clearly she is smart okay you can’t deny it. Like Tim Keller in his The Reason for God, McLaughlin is delivering the fruit of her years involved in frontline Christian apologetics. In Keller’s case, that was with young, upwardly mobile New York urbanites. In McLaughlin’s, it was through her work with the Veritas Forum. She has an evangelical upbringing and a Cambridge education, a PhD in literature. Her twelve chapters—one per objection to the...
One of my wife’s best Christian friends at our homeschool group is the wife of the talented music director at a large area church. This couple has become respected friends of ours, and recently they asked us to house two singers from a choir that was visiting their church. These two had themselves been in the choir in their undergrad days: The Master’s University Chorale. We agreed to keep two singers and provide them a sack lunch the next morning, and we packed up the whole family to go hear their concert. The night was enjoyable; they were good.
(The TMU Chorale was not quite as good as the BJU Chorale, I must say out of loyalty to my alma mater and the truth… But I still greatly enjoyed the concert. They did well.)
The two singers who stayed at our home made a very positive impression on us. One of them had already stood out as one of the best soloists in the group; they both seemed like earnest Christians who wanted to serve the Lord with their gifts—and they brought my wife and me instantly back to our energetic young days in Christian college. (About two years ago, I think it was.) We all sat at our table till past parents’ bedtime and laughed about...
My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home by Michael Brendan Dougherty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked up this book on the effusive recommendation of Alan Jacobs. At first I thought I might tire of it: though I felt sympathy for a fatherless boy, I confess to my shame that that sympathy did not extend to listening to him moon to his dad about the absence of his dad.
But something happened in the emotional tenor of the book: by making his efforts to recover a father an effort to also recover a sense of nation and people (both of which I take for granted), Dougherty succeeded in sounding not whiny but hopeful. And when he turned his penetrating gaze and his grand prose back on America, he saw something I needed to see again:
Mass media was my primary teacher growing up. And it taught me and my friends how to conform with one...
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