5.5 Random Things #8

5.5.  This post is dedicated to the Sermon Writer’s Block. 5.  I really liked Michael Bird’s (relatively) short post on how the Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Christus Victor models of atonement work together.  4.  His biting sarcasm is largely what makes Carl Trueman so popular, but it also makes it easy to miss some of his [...]

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Where and Why of Church Planting

There has been quite an uproar over a recent post written by Bill Streger called, “Uncool People Need Jesus Too.”  Streger is involved with the Acts 29 Network and is responsible for assessing applicants for church planting.  In this post, he notes that every church plant vision sounds the same and targets the same group [...]

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John Huss: Some Thoughts on His Passing

Some of you might read the title of this post and have two questions: who is John Huss and when did he die (and why didn’t I read about it on CNN)?  To answer the first question, John Huss (or Jan Hus, to be more accurate) was a 15th century Bohemian priest who was highly [...]

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Jesus’ Healings & the Resurrection of the Dead

In recent weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of the Apostolic Fathers and other early church writers for a paper.  The more time I spend with them, the more I realize that they were a whole lot smarter than I originally thought and far better theologians than many give them credit for. One of those [...]

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Possessions & Power: A Lesson from Basil the Great

One of my favorite stories from studying church history involves Basil the Great, the 4th century bishop of Caesarea and one of the Cappadocians Fathers.  Basil is also considered the father of Eastern monasticism, who lived in relative poverty (especially given his lofty position) in order to help the poor. Basil was also a widely [...]

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Ancient Christianity & Modern Missions

Coming off the reposting of my review of Thomas Oden’s book, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind, I was thinking about some of the implications studying early African Christianity would have for modern missions.  As one who works for a missions organization and helps train future missionaries, I’m constantly looking to draw out practical application [...]

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Book Review: How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind

Note: this book review originally appeared on my old blog on 8/13/08. Thanks to Adrianna of IVP for a review copy of this book. It is still a prevalent but hopefully decreasingly common (thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Phillip Jenkins) view that Christianity is a “Western” (American or European) religion. Whereas Jenkins [...]

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RoTM: Surprised by the 95 Theses

Most of us have heard of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses.  We learned about them in world history class in high school, noting that it sparked the Protestant Reformation (which is more or less true).  A few of us know that Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the chapel door in Wittenburg, Germany- and a couple [...]

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How We Got the Bible

Special thanks to Chris at Zondervan for a copy of this book to review.  You can also check out Chris and others at Koinonia, Zondervan Academic’s new blog.   Every year in my classes, one of the most common questions I get is “how did we get the Bible?”  Most don’t know much about how the [...]

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