Some Here, Some There — March 27, 2015

by Dan Phillips

Once again, start small, grows until noon TX time.

• If you (like me) never wander to First Things, you probably missed Carl Trueman on the 20th anniversary mourning Evangelicals and Catholics Together. It's informative and thought-provoking and a bit snarky (hel-lo! Trueman!), and has wonderful quotables. Such as:
• "...stadium platform ecumenism is personality heavy and doctrine light. It has placed some very theologically inept people in positions of significant public influence based solely on their ability to pull a crowd. Not all of its senior leaders ultimately seemed particularly clear even on the nature and importance of the doctrine of the Trinity."
• "...can one really claim to agree on the Gospel of God without first agreeing on the God of the Gospel?"
• "Before we start thanking the Lord that we are not like other men, we should ask ourselves whether our own alternative ecumenism, so often controlled by a few unaccountable powerbrokers and by big money, really possesses more integrity."
• Bam.
• And this, from the What Could Go Wrong? department:

• The Jolly Scott, Prof. David Murray, has a very helpful note on 1 Timothy 4:10. That's one of those verses, like 1 John 2:2, that folks with a deficient view of God's saving work plop down on the table, as if the mere citing of the verse is contraindicative to affirming God's sovereign grace — blissfully unaware that the verses are at least as problematic for their own view.
• Here's a review of Logos 6 from Jason Helopoulos. My own is forthcoming.
• This just gives me a chuckle. I'd shared that a poor pastor, given TWTG as a gift, found it "terribly disappointing." I guess my readers have found his review "terribly disappointing," as currently 167 have found it unhelpful, to 9 who found it helpful. And I'm not certain what those nine mean, because I know at least two whom the review "helped" decide to buy the book.

Today's gift to @Frank_Turk — http://t.co/aMHCKMQltf (You can look, too)
— Dan Phillips (@BibChr) March 24, 2015

• Professed Christians dating non-Christians: compare and contrast this and this.
• Proverbs 22:6 — here's a post, and here's a post. Hunh.
• Interesting article on whether armed security is Biblical or not. (SPOLIER ALERT: it is.)
• And I leave you with a useful new word, courtesy of our own Trogdor:

Roger Olson thoughtfully shows the folly of presuming to judge God, engaging in some hardcore emotegesis: http://t.co/xmKFrhzl23
— Machel (@trogdor42) March 26, 2015

• Here, BTW, is Olson's article, subtitled Them Calvinists SO 'TUPID! Olson is helped to his conclusion by failing to allude to, let alone deal with, as much as one verse of Scripture.
• And here, BTW and more helpfully, is Doug Wilson's first takedown thereof. (To be evenhanded, it is also without Scripture references; it is more of a very effective exercise in Proverbs 26:5.)
• To me, Roger Olson is kind of the Bob Dylan of theology. In that every time I take a sample of actual product, I am baffled at the reputation.

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