As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“Whose prayer and whose faith? Verse 14 is clear that it is the elders who are doing the praying. And since it is supposed to be a prayer of faith, it seems that the faith that is primarily in view would be of those praying that prayer of faith: the elders’ faith.” - P&D
“The pendulum of 20th-century evangelical scholarship on Aquinas has swung between strongly negative appraisals (…Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til…) and, since the 1980s, more appreciative receptions (…Norman Geisler and Arvin Vos).
“Dinesh never really got off of the big picture into the details, so there’s a lot of vagueness….” - Gavin Ortlund
Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers. (KJV, 2 Timothy 2:14)
I’ve often heard this text used to discourage detailed debate about the meaning of Scripture passages, or even to devalue highly precise Bible study. Is this what Paul’s warning to Timothy here is about?
First, observe that whatever “striving about words” is, Paul clearly saw it as something that threatened Timothy’s ministry. Timothy is to “charge them before the Lord” not to do this. Second, the activity is doubly discouraged as lacking in value (“no profit”) and also as causing damage of some kind to hearers (“subverting”). Third, the activity apparently involved individuals in at least two roles: the “strivers” and the “hearers.”
So what activity is being forbidden here? What is meant by “strive not about words”?
“Desecration can take many forms, but it is always characterized by certain things: a delight in dehumanizing those made in God’s image; and an absence of gratitude to God” - Carl Trueman
A review of Dispensationalism Revisited: A Twenty-First Century Restatement,* edited by Kevin T. Bauder & R. Bruce Compton, Plymouth, MN, Central Seminary Press, 2023, 294 pages, paperback.
This book was written to commemorate the life and teaching of Charles A. Hauser, Jr, a man who did not have a high profile ministry but who had a big impact through his faithful service to the Lord, and the tributes at the back of the book are not to be missed.
It may seem odd to suggest that the book entitled Apocalupsis does not belong to the genre of literature commonly referred to as apocalyptic. Nonetheless that is my suggestion here. The term employed in the title of the book denotes a revelation or disclosure.1 While this particular revealing or disclosing describes a broad swathe of eschatological events, it is not its own literary genre.
Apocalyptic as a genre is described as “characteristically pseudonymous; it takes narrative form, employs esoteric language, expresses a pessimistic view of the present, and treats the final events as imminent.”2 Henry Barclay Swete (Cambridge), even while arguing that Revelation is apocalyptic literature, admits that the book differs from that genre, in that the book of Revelation (1) is not pseudepigraphic, (2) engages a specific audience (seven churches), (3) has a significant church focus, rather than a purely Israel nation-centered focus, and (4) includes notes of insight and foresight that are more indicative of inspiration than is found in earlier extra-biblical apocalyptic literature.3
“I am becoming concerned that we are witnessing, in the recent ascendency of the ‘premodern’ in contemporary evangelical literature, the triumph of Barth and ultimately of Gnosticism in the evangelical church” - Mark Snoeberger
Discussion