Why there was no “evangelical-modernist” controversy

sifilings
Our Fundamentalist Betters What separates evangelicals from fundamentalists is that we evangelicals don’t breathe fire, and we have fancy degrees hanging in our studies, instead of pictures of Billy Sunday. We evangelicals are they who cut this deal with the modernists, “We will call you brother, if you will call us scholar.”

Discussion

Christian Education's Greatest Challenges, Part 2

Les Lofquist

Republished, with permission, from Voice magazine, Jan./Feb. 2012. Read Part 1.

Perhaps the weakest part of our local churches’ Christian Education (CE) program is in the area of teacher training. So many churches appoint people and turn them loose without training them in the ministry they are asked to assume.

The CE workers are handling the Word of God. Do they know the Word? Do they know how to teach? Do they know something about the age group they’re teaching as well as some details about the administration and organization of the program in which they’re working? All too often they don’t.

When Paul wrote to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, he gave Timothy the process for developing a strong ministry. Paul wrote, “Don’t build this work around yourself. This is not your work alone. You build the church by involving other people. You must train other people in the things that I have taught you, and in turn they will become good teachers also.” This is the greatest need we have in Christian Education today.

Discussion

Three Lessons from Heaven

Marsilius

There is a popular notion now among some evangelical scholars that the Hebrews thought heaven was a huge, hard, fixed vault that no one could pierce through. After all, Genesis 1:6 describes the heavens as a “vault” (Heb. raqia). The Septuagint translators used the word stereoma, meaning “something fixed, firmament.”

But what kind of vault did the Hebrews mean? Every Hebrew shepherd watched that fixed vault (or at least everything in it) move every night. They also watched some of its lights move left, but later rightward in the heaven. They likewise noticed that the moon appeared at different spots among the stars as the weeks went by. What else was there to do outside in the dark?

No, of course they did not know that there are nine planets circling our sun, or that the sun is nine light minutes from the earth, or that we reside in the Milky Way galaxy. My guess is that they concluded by observation that the sun moves around the earth. But we should never be taken with the idea that the Hebrews were completely primitive about the sky. 1000 years after Moses, Aristotle explained the heavens as being a spherical vault, inside of which sun, moon and stars moved. The space in between was filled with ether. 2000 years after Aristotle, Einstein described the universe as bounded and filled with ether. Essentially, though refined, the concept of the universe has not changed much from Moses’ day to ours.

The Hebrew word raqia can also take the meaning “expanse” (the primary meaning, according to BDB). And that is precisely how the rest of the Old Testament describes the heavens. In 16 places the Bible says that God “stretched out” the heavens (Heb. natah), now measured at 13-14 billion light years across. To make the point more clear, the OT says that God stretched out the heavens “like a curtain” (Is. 40:22), or “like a tent” (Ps. 104:2). So much for the cast iron dome of the theologians.

Discussion

Desiring God Ceases Direct Sales and Puts Inventory on Clearance

sifilings
“We’ll tell you more in the months to come. But here’s one implication of this clarified focus on the Web. We’ve decided that this ship could sail faster and farther if we stopped carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of book inventory…We are leaving the selling business.” “Speaking of dumping the inventory, we are putting all of our books and resources on sale for $5 or less. Think of this as a transition sale.

Discussion