In my final year of Greek in seminary I found New Testament Greek Vocabulary, an audio recording of the Greek word frequency lists. And my score on the vocabulary tests improved. Since that time I have been looking for audio of the Greek New Testament that I can bear to listen to. There has been a freely available version out for a few years, but now there is a new one on the horizon. Logos has a new Greek Audio Bible in the works, but it has a karaoke twist to it. As you listen to the text, Libronix will highlight the text of the passage.

Currently Logos is finding out if enough people are interested in a, to publish it. When I signed up to show my interest, there was only 25% of the necessary interest. Now it is up to about 75%. Head on over there, see a video of it in action reading John 3:16 and 1 John 2:1, and sign up for it too. I am eager for this to be published.

In last Sunday’s sermon, we were challenged to love others, and I realized that I thought that a person could know God and yet lack love for others.  I believed that the knowledge of God didn’t necessarily bring me to love others–that it could be ineffective. The invalid assumptions necessary to believe this are blatant and embarrassing, but I am not stuck in my former disregard for God.

Thanks to Eric's previous post, the comments are now working again.

My apologies to everyone who was frustrated by this error.

Calling all Theoblogians.

Go and find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

Then add your identity in the comments.

This was seen at Mere Comments, a blog by the editors of Touchstone magazine.

Christianity can seem like a swarm of buzzwords, catch-phrases, and euphemisms. Current buzzwords tell us what has captured the collective attention of the church. Catch phrases tell us the efforts being made to influence the church. But euphemisms have a deeper meaning. More accurately: Euphemisms prove that there is a deeper reality. While buzzwords and catch-phrases reveal wishful thinking, euphemisms reveal a “wish it weren’t so” kind of thinking. There are aspects of reality that we cannot avoid and cannot avoid talking about. So we resort to euphemism.

Perhaps the use of euphemisms in the presence of the true God is evidence to his weight of glory. We speak of the “hand of providence,” “dying to self,” “accepting Jesus as your personal savior,” and “besetting sins” among others. Yet we shy away from fully considering what they mean. In this way our use of euphemism reveals something of the power of our faith.

I have started attending Wednesday night prayer meeting again. I promised my wife that I would. She is tired of taking our children to Wednesday night activities by herself. Over the past year, I have skipped more than I have attended. I have been avoiding prayer meeting because I couldn’t stand that we prayed as though we were afraid to bother Jesus. Nearly one year ago, Diane was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the most aggressive and deadly cancers. As her cancer progressed, our church started praying for her to die comfortably and quickly. This kind of prayer is not advocated in Scripture. Instead, we find audacious prayers and requests.

The predicament of the men of Jabesh-Gilead in 1 Samuel 11 launched the reign of Israel’s first king. Before Saul took the reins as Israel’s first king, he was holding the reins of his father’s oxen. He is an example for all the men afraid to step up and be the leaders God meant for them to be.

This morning my son Nicholas (age 6) described to me how to use food coloring to make a flower turn two different colors. He then told me that he wanted to do this with grass. I wanted to help him understand that the dark color of grass would make it harder to see the color change, so I asked him, “What color is grass?”

Without a moment’s hesitation he answered, “Brown.”

My wife burst out in laughter, and I hung my head in defeat. The reality of our lawn the past two summers trumped the answer I hoped for. I only wish that the reality of the text of the Bible was allowed to trump our doctrines, our expected answers. But reality is just crazy talk.

L.M. Montgomery is the creator of Anne of Green Gables, the bosom friend of millions of young women. Her two volume journal, somewhat more rare than her fiction, has been some of my wife’s reading material the past few months. Montgomery eventually married a minister, a decent man, after her own Gilbert was gone from her life. But the hollowness of their religion is revealed in their disregard for eternal truths. Montgomery’s 1919 theology held the belief that believing the guilty were condemned before God –and that this might apply to you—was a sign, the sign, of insanity.

I have just read the powerful ideas put forth by Dan Edelen in We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure and advocated by the iMonk. Their contention is that the church shuns people who experience failure and elevates people who experience success. The following excerpt captures the conflict they describe:

Your church is looking for new elders. Which of these two 40-year old men has a better chance of becoming an elder, the self-made man who runs his own company OR the fellow who works the night shift as a convenience store clerk? In the split second (Blink!) you thought about that pair, did class distinction enter into your assessment? Has anything been said about the spiritual maturity of those men? Don't we assume that one is more spiritually mature simply because he runs a successful business, while the other only makes $8/hr.?

The question of how we measure success is compelling. Most of us have been offended by judgments both shallow and wrong –whether we were the one judged or just a bystander. But Edelen confuses three distinct issues in one guilt-inducing post.

This week my alumni newsletter from Corban College arrived with its feature article entitled, “Eliminating the Sacred/Secular Split: Restoring a Biblical Worldview.” I was very interested to see how the ideas in it were interchangeable with the Spiritual reality vs. Reality distinction that I brought up in Stewards of Reality. The article is about Nancy Pearcey’s recent lectures at the college. Nancy and her husband Rick are editors of the Pearcey Report and are influential thinkers and writers in Washington DC.

“Spiritual truth”
“Spiritual realities”
“In God's eyes”
These phrases reveal a distinction made between reality and “spiritual reality.” They are a pre-emptive capitulation to a materialistic view of the world. The adjective “spiritual” modifies the noun “reality” as though we aren't speaking about actual reality. Isn't it a sign of mental illness to isolate a part of reality and treat that as everything that exists? In truth, there would be no reality at all if the part of reality recognized by materialism were everything.

Christian apologists try to speak the truth into the language of the partial-realists to bring some to a knowledge of the truth, but we have also adopted this language of partial reality as our own. Christians are not suffering from a collective delusion that doesn't fit well with reality. We are actually the stewards of reality. We need to think this way, talk this way and act this way.

Tonight my wife and I were greatly impressed by The Nativity Story, the new movie with Keisha Castle-Hughes of Whale-Rider as Mary. The movie was well done. It was done with believable, sepia-tone realism, portraying the poverty of Mary’s family and Joseph, the threat posed by Rome’s oppressive taxation, and the difficulty of their journey to Bethlehem.

My knowledge of the nativity led to several suspenseful moments in the film when it could have turned into a farce, but it remained plausible throughout. Even the miraculous conception was shown to be implausible in the tight-knit village of Nazareth. The appearances of the angel were appropriately intimidating, and Herod was ominously paranoid, a man who could order the execution of babies in order to protect his throne.

This superb drama includes a few moments of humor, but the humor, like the rest of the movie is both reverent and true to human nature. Two pre-teen boys witnessed John's circumcision. It quickly became evident that it was the first circumcision they had ever witnessed for their snickering commentary turned to blanched, horrified expressions as John’s cry rang out. I am sure I did not need to hear the sound of the moil’s knife, but as I mentioned before, the movie strove for realism. The appearance of the wise men in Bethlehem would have once been a sticking point for me, a plot alteration for the sake of drama, except for an email I received from a pastor friend from Alaska.

When an author sits down to write he or she may write whatever they wish. The author has complete freedom on the page (or scroll). He may write his locker combination. She may write a novel. He may write a persuasive argument or she might encourage patriotism. Any given author can marshal words to serve any purpose, and no authorial purpose has ever been weightier than communicating the message of the eternal Creator to his creatures. The authors of Scripture were aware of this weight, and they wrote so that we could be confident in the message we have received.

In Scriptural Authority I described some of the superficial ways that we may consider the Bible as authoritative. In Biblical Bible Authority, I described how the authors of the Bible embedded means to verify their messages. In this post, I will describe how they built on that authority to establish the supreme authority of God’s words over all other words including their own.

“To him who knows his website has an error and doesn't fix it, to him it is sin”
 - 1st Hesitations

This is a confession.
I have been informed that posting a comment gives an error. Fortnuately the comment still gets added. I have not yet figured out why the error is occurring, but it is on my list of things that should have been done yesterday. I hope to correct this by mid-day tomorrow. So if you want to have some great excitement here at Theoblogian, you only have a few hours left to make an "err-raising" comment.

Things have been a little slow here at  Theoblogian. I thought a word of explanation might be in order. We all know that Charlie hasn’t been getting any sleep lately, but Sam and I have been busy too. Sam is preparing his office for a move. Three words: “unorganized academic records.” I have been doing yard work. Do any of you remember the healthy yard my wife asked for for Christmas? Well I finally got around to doing the work. And this week add jury duty for my wife, carpet cleaning on her second day of jury duty, and things are pretty quiet around here for all of us.

In my last post I wrote to establish that the Bible may be relied upon at a number of different levels. Someone may treat as simply another book, no more reliable than any of the self-help clutter on bookstore shelves. This idea did not receive a warm welcome because the Bible is truly reliable, and this sets it apart from any writing which shares the features I described.

My goal was to set the groundwork that the Bible may be externally established as an authoritative collection of writings and then to move on to describe how the Bible establishes its authority internally. Those external features prepare us to accept the authority of the Bible before we even open its pages. In this post, I will describe some principles that govern how the human authors established the authority of their writings. I will also use a passage from the Koran to contrast the basis of the Koran’s authority with that of the Bible.

The furor over the inerrancy of Scripture has been at a fever pitch for decades now. One might get the idea that it is more important to toe the line on inerrancy than it is to believe the deity of Jesus. After all, is it even possible to believe the Messiah without ascribing to The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy?

Collectively, we seem to have forgotten that faith is central to well…our faith. We each trust Scripture to varying degrees, and it is this trust of Scripture that I want to emphasize. We cannot get away from the need to trust scripture. The certainty that is claimed for Scripture is a matter of faith, but it is promoted as though it was established by the scientific method.

There are many different degrees of confidence that a person may have in Scripture. Most of these fall far short of the certainty that many have in the Scriptures, but we must first acknowledge our dependence on the testimony of others.

Due to tasks such as bringing this website into a more carefree state August has been somewhat of a dry month for reading material here at Theoblogian. To compensate for this, I would like to introduce you all to Bookins.com. This site is for trading books. You offer some of your books for trade, and when someone decides they want it, you slap a shipping label on it, and send it off to the lucky new owner. For each book you put up for trade, you get a certain number of points based on the value of the book. You can trade these points in for that book you have always wanted that someone over in Tennessee put up for trade. Those points plus $3.99 gets the new book.

Welcome to the new and improved Theoblogian.org.

Many of you may have noticed that the site was unavailable some of the weekend. This was due to a change in our name servers. Since you are here reading this, you may be confident that the change was successful!

On the surface Theoblogian.org looks much as it always has. The biggest change is in how you make comments. You must log in before you can make comments, and in order to log in, you must first become a theoblogian.

In my eagerness to eliminate spam in the comments (web-graffiti) on Theoblogian, the site is up minus some features. The archives will be added back in soon, and various others odd and ends will be corrected too.

This means that over the next several weeks, you may find the site temporarily unavailable as new things get moved out. Updates will take about 15 minutes, so if you find the site unavailable, please try back a little later.

Lack of Activity

You may have been noticing a lack of activity here at Theoblogian this month.

My excuse is that I have been reprogramming the website. We have been getting about 8 spam comments a day for the past three weeks. So I decided to upgrade my knowledge of ASP.Net to version 2.0 and eliminate the possibility of the spam at the same time. Consequently I haven’t had a lot of time for writing interesting stuff.

If any of you are burning with curiosity you may go and see the upgraded site, but the visible differences are very minor. The biggest difference is that you will need to log in to make comments. I am interested in any suggestions or comments that you may have. Please leave any comments here, but if they start with “Nice Site,” “Cool site,” or anything Italian, I may think it is just more spam.

How does application differ from interpretation? Or does it differ? I was certain that they did differ. I even came up with a term merging interpretation and application into “interprecation.” This clever term not only represent the blurring of the distinction between the two activities, it also reminds me of “imprecation,” something appropriately directed at one who doesn’t distinguish between application and interpretation. I enjoyed my own cleverness until I read the very helpful “Making Sense of the Old Testament, Three Crucial Questions” by Tremper Longman III. In it he states, “It may be possible to distinguish between meaning and application on a strictly theoretical level, but it is never possible to do so in practice.”

Well clever isn’t very satisfying if I’m just plain wrong so I decided to take a closer look at the differences that I thought I perceived.

Thank you all for your prayers. My partial thyroidectomy (surgery) went well. The Dr. removed half my thyroid, but I didn’t get to bring it home in a jar to show my boys. My folks came over from Idaho for the surgery, and they got to spend lots of quality time with four adorable, well-behaved children. Before dinner tonight the Dr. called and told me that the pathology report had come back already, and my lump was benign. This means that I only need to go in to get my stitches out and then live happily ever after.

Everything else is going well as well. Recovery is progressing at a break-neck pace (that is not the same as a cut-throat rate), and in only four weeks I will be able to pick up my children again. That is going to be the toughest part of convalescence. My three-year-old loves to be “walked to sleep” a ritual in which I walk around our yard with his head resting on my shoulder. This is ritual we both enjoy, and often it results in him falling asleep.

Throughout the gospel of Mark Jesus repeatedly instructed people to keep quiet about Jesus’ miracles. At first glance this may seem a bit contradictory. Jesus went through the countryside, preaching, but whenever he did something amazing, he tried to hush it up. He didn’t want celebrity or even servants. He desired to be loved. He sought friends. This and a bit of reflection on human nature makes Jesus shyness understandable.

On Independence Day, Lewis’s thoughts on the love of country is a breath of fresh air. In these days of strident discourse on America’s role in the world we need a right understanding of our love for our country. We cannot throw out patriotism as some would do. Neither can we equate love for our nation with love for justice. The rest of this post is an excerpt from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.

When scripture appears to be open to different interpretations depending upon interpreters’ presuppositions than the task at hand is no longer interpreting scripture, but arguing opinions.

The interpretation of scripture transcends what we bring to the text. Authorial intent does not change. Some discard authorial intent as an impossible standard. It may appear subjective. One may claim to find authorial intent with only a cursory examination of the text. Another believes that his speculations about the circumstances of the author establishes a better authorial intent. Neither trusts the text of the scripture they wish to interpret. Mistakes in interpretation are much easier to perpetuate in isolation. The community of faith is a guard against such misinterpretation.

Back in March, the doctor noticed that the left side of my thyroid was enlarged. Last Wednesday, I had a second biopsy because the first came back “non-diagnostic,” a technical term for “didn't get the bad stuff with all that pokin’ around.”

This biopsy came back diagnostic, and the diagnosis was cancer. If you were told that you were gonna get cancer, but you got to pick which kind...this would be a good choice. It doesn't metastasize (spread and kill all of you), but it is cancer, and it will be cut out.

The exorcism is July 19th. So I have three weeks. And I have committed these three weeks to a reflection on life vs. sin & death and my role in this conflict. Sidelines are non-existent in this conflict so I really have no idea where I have been sitting.

Mark has an amazing percentage of stories that reveal Jesus’ frustration during his ministry: healings ending with commands for silence that were ignored, escaping crowds only seeking healing, continual conflict with the religiosos, and amazement at the pandemic lack of faith. Mark reveals Jesus as a man whose ministry did not go as he wanted it to go.

If you tried to visit yesterday, you would have seen an ugly error message saying (in essence) that you didn’t get to enjoy the brilliance that is Theoblogian.org. It said it in very precise computereeze, but may have appeared incoherent, and you might have thought Theoblogian partied a little too hard on its birthday.

The truth is that Sunday morning, sometime after 7AM one of the servers here where we host Theoblogian died a gruesome death. Official cause of death is “failure on its hard drive controller.”

Thank you for your patience and for checking back to make sure that Theoblogian.org is virtually OK.

David Murrow's book, Why Men Hate Going to Church is an amazing book that actually answers the question of the title. I learned of the book while writing Is God Manly? and picked it up hoping to gain another man's perspective on the intersection of manliness and godliness. I was a bit disappointed, though. Murrow answered the question implied by the title, but not mine. His assumption appears to be that godliness is the automatic result of involvement in church.

The other day Adam contributed to the discussion on Is God Manly and asked, “If the leaders of the church are men, how did feminine values become predominant?” Murrow asks the same question, “How did a faith founded by a Man and his twelve male disciples become so popular with women, but anathema to men?”

Before four notch and seven years our fathers got further, after this continent, a new nation, understood in the liberty, and the affair inaugurated that all men are caused on an equal footing.

This is the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address translated both to and from German. It is recognizable, yet nothing like the original. The U.S. Department of State website says of the Gettysburg Address

Few documents in the growth of American democracy are as well known or as beloved as the prose poem Abraham Lincoln delivered at the dedication of the military cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

This makes it ideal for demonstrating the difficulties of translating the Bible. Unless you know a second language, the difficulties and pitfalls of translating between languages may be difficult to grasp, but thanks to the Babel Fish we may understand the difficulties through a truly American text.

The error of the Pharisees and scribes was the failure to distinguish between their teachings based on Scripture and the Scriptures themselves. Generations of men had treasured and pored over the Scriptures and contributed their insights into the meaning of the Scriptures. These became the Talmud, the record of Rabbinic discussion and the fundamental source for rabbinic legislation and case law. Jesus condemns them for giving greater authority to these  interpretations and applications of Scripture than Scripture. “For the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God, you hypocrites!” (Matthew 15:6)

With the outright attacks on manliness represented by gender-neutered translations, and the general unconcern over this issue, I have decided to highlight example of manliness in Scripture. My first example comes from the book of Job in which Job goes toe to toe with God like an ancient Greek hero. God, for his part, comes back at him with a blast of undiluted masculinity.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how manly is God? This is an idea that has been growing on me for some time now. I want God to be manly. During our men’s Bible study at church a man at my table put a label on his notebook that reads, “Biblical Leadership for Men.” The “for Men” leapt off the page at me. This Bible study isn’t the ordinary, gender-neutralized Bible study. It is for men. Our pastor is determined to lead the men of our church to be leaders of our families. It was during our weekly men’s Bible study that I realized the scope of this need. We have forty to fifty men at a men’s Bible study in a church of 200.

I suggested the idea to my wife that men want God to be manly, and a pained look flickered across her face. She considered “manly” a belittling adjective for God. But God repeatedly identifies himself as Father. I crave a hero, someone whom I can pattern my life after. Can God be this hero?

In my continuing series on interactions with the church fathers via the Ancient Christian Commentary on the Scripture volume IV I have found an interesting interpretational method. When seeking a life of ease whether in ancient Christendom or modern, citing Scripture may be a supremely effective technique for getting your way. In order to accomplish this you will need to become skilled at interpretational methods overlooked by many so-called leading theologians. To complete the commercial cliché: these are methods the leading theologians don’t want you to know about. They provide great power to the self-important, and since that is what we are all about here at Theoblogian.org, I will describe one of these methods for you.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the season of sorrows and changes of the season, and last week I found out that I have a 3cm lump on my thyroid. This is very treatable, and I may only lose half my thyroid. Whew! So I have nothing to worry about except the biopsy next Thursday and the surgery to remove the thing. Now I am on the prayer sheet at church, but I don’t want to need prayer. Last night I realized that I have been giving God the cold-shoulder. While I heard my name coming from various groups of praying people, my own prayer concerning this lump was reluctant, petulant and blind to God’s character.

Sunday following our Easter dinner an unusual topic of conversation came up: congregational comments during the sermon. I don’t mean the loud “Amen!” or “Preach it!” comments. I mean the passing of notes or leaning over to your neighbor and whispering kind of comments. Strict etiquette may forbid such exchanges, but perhaps they aren’t all bad. Maybe they can even be beneficial.

Through my grief God turned my understanding of him on its side. Before my baptism of grief, I may have said that “sin” or “his glory” was God’s bottom line. Yes. I may have considered God’s glory to be the organizing principle of God’s activity in the world and in history. I viewed God, first and foremost, as transcendent, abstracted from the world—unfamiliar with sorrow. This appears obvious to me now in the question I voiced one night in that first year after Nancy’s death. The answer I received changed my relationship with God.

How has sorrow changed you? Has it affected you r relationship with the Lord? Stiffened your resolve to serve him? Sapped your strength? Or has the effect of sorrow become a tangled mess? Perhaps it is a tangle that you have grown tired of, and now you try to live as you did before the sorrow. I am turning back to this tangle again. I have no expectation of sorting it all out, but I do wish to consider what changes have taken root and grown up in my life. Perhaps some have borne good fruit.

In the story of the raising of Jarius’s daughter from the dead, Jesus intentionally deceived the crowd of professional mourners. This troubles me. Lying is never right...is it? I always feel guilty when I deceive, but my wife pointed out that Jesus deceived of the crowd in Mark 5, and I believe that her conclusion is justified. Jesus didn’t want the knowledge of what he had done to be spread, and he deceived the crowd to conceal the fact that he had just raised a girl from the dead.

Now that my office is (mostly) done, I think I need another project. Johan Huibers of the Netherlands is building his own 1/5 size replica of Noah’s Ark. He intends to stock it with farmyard animals and sail it on the interior waters of the Netherlands.

Where is your Strong's concordance? If you are reading this you have a computer, and you probably have at least one Strong's Exhaustive Concordance. So where is it? Do you still use it or have you switched to an electronic concordance?

Sam and I just had a big smack-down over my spot-on fisherman post. Surprisingly, we both made cogent arguments. Early on Sam appeared to be hung up on a point about exegesis, but in the end he came to a rather startling conclusion.

Below is the transcript of the exchange, edited slightly to make us sound even more cogent. What do you think of Sam’s conclusion?

I don’t mean, “Are you a good fisherman or a bad fisherman?” Are you a commercial fisherman or a recreational fisherman? For the first time yesterday it dawned on me that our understanding of evangelism may hinge on that question. Before that realization struck, fishing with a pole was as good as fishing with a net. I have not done much of either. Now I see that they are poles apart. Peter, James, and John were net fishermen—commercial fishermen, and that makes for a very different relationship with the fish.

This morning in Sunday School we covered 2 Peter 3:8 on our journey through 2^nd Peter. Peter wrote in certain terms, “Do not overlook this one fact…”(ESV) in relation to God’s faithfulness to his promise (interesting that “promise” is singular!). It is important not to demand that God act according to my timeline or my interpretation of his timeline. His plan is beyond my scope of understanding, and I must fall back to trusting him.

So how do I keep this one fact before me?

Lo, it has been nearly two months since I wrote anything about the Ancient Christian Commentary. I began this project eager to interact with these ancient Christians about 1^st and 2^nd Samuel. Since I wrote on Augustine, however, I have not spent much time with them nor have I found much to interact with. In order not to let this project die completely, this installment will address this disappointment.

Following Hannah’s Song we have numerous rich pericopes: the decline and fall of Eli and his sons; the call of Samuel; the capture of the Ark and its sojourn in Philistia. In almost none of them, however, did I find good exegesis. These stories appear as illustrations for sermons. Gregory the Great seemed close in his analysis of the afflictions of the Philistines (1 Samuel 5-6), but, in the end, he used it as an illustration of dying to sin.

The government of Pakistan has added itself to the ranks of those natians censoring the internet. Scott over at Magic Statistics commented on this turn of events. Western Resistance started the discussion, but here I will take advantage of this opportunity to reveal the most amusing thing that has happened to me while surfing the net.

I was taking a course on Islam from Dr. Vreeland in which he required us to read through the Koran. I decided to use the database compiling feature in Bibleworks so that I could quickly search for phrases that I half-remembered. I only needed an electronic version of the Koran that I could reformat for the BW compiler and that is how my adventure began.

Hebrews 11:6
If you are going to come to God you must believe that
1. He is
2. He rewards those who seek him

What is the reward for seeking God? I have never really tried to answer this question. Maybe it is my aversion to a "contract based" relationship with God. Maybe it is my Baptistic upbringing. Perhaps I have considered this a which-came-first kind of question. It was a question that shouldn’t really be asked. But once I admitted that I was asking the question, I was able to seek an answer. Context is always a good place to look when I don’t understand a portion of Scripture, so I read the rest of chapter 11. I read Hebrews 11, keeping verse 6 at the front of my mind: “What is this reward?”

I understand why many so-called exegetes prefer proof-text to context. I do. Context muddies the waters. I, for one, am uncomfortable with the answer I found to my question, “What is the reward for seeking God?”

The last time I wrote something here, I decried the disconnect between Scripture and doctrine. Then I went off and worked 70+ hours a week to complete a major project at work. But now I am a free man again, and I wish to address how Scripture is used in the pulpit. “The pulpit” is shorthand for any occasion in which the man of God teaches or preaches. On these occasions, he teaches how to handle the Word of Truth by example.

In many churches today you can find a pastoral infatuation with “application.” They are disenchanted with “doctrine.” The goal is to preach the Scriptures in a way that is relevant to the congregation. The overly-academic sermon is considered boorish, and people must be able to take something home with them

The “doctrine” of such churches is that doctrine is not relevant to folks living Godly lives. Their effort then is to take Scripture and refine it into high quality fertilizer. People are emerging from these churches incapable of benefiting from Scripture. We need to remember the connections between doctrine and daily life. The fact that most people don’t remember the connection does not mean that it has vanished.

In his writing on Hannah’s Song in 1 Samuel 2 Augustine confirmed the value of this series. Contemporary commentaries are filled with catalogues of controversies. Ancient writers came to the Scriptures one on one and shared  their wonder and excitement. Over the years controversies have grown over their insights and now they are all but forgotten.

Oops.

Over the past few days there have been some troubles getting to some of the pages here at Theoblogian. I believe that I have resolved them to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

The eyes of the LORD preserve knowledge, But He overthrows the words of the treacherous man. Proverbs 22:12.

I had several proof-texts to choose from once I settled on a title for this post, but this was by far the most apt.

For my birthday I received the Ancient Christian Commentary  on Scripture Volume IV – Joshua through 2^nd Samuel. Through seminary I spent many hours in these books under the tutelage of Dr. Vreeland. He may eschew responsibility for my conclusions, but feel free to blame him any way. Having spent time in the former prophets I am eager to interact with Ambrose, Athanasius, and the others.