Congratulations

by Phil Johnson

eet Allyson Felix, a neighbor of mine. Her dad, Paul, teaches at The Master's Seminary. She won silver and gold medals in the Beijing Olympics this week.

Believe it or not, Allyson was actually a little disappointed with those results. But watch this short video-essay about her, and I think you'll see that Allyson herself is no disappointment:



Yes, she really is that good.

Phil

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Gratuitous Mobile Device Post

by Frank Turk

I realize that I'm the only one on earth who cares about this, but I haven't posted here in two weeks, I have insomnia and a hacking cough that's causing me a lot of pain, and you weren't really doing anything else. If you don't want to read about my experiments with my new iPod Touch, just skip down to the Dose of Spurgeon, below, and God Bless you.

So I was away on a business trip two weeks ago and won a 16 GB iPod Touch at the conference I was attending. Completely fabulous. And I have a wireless network in my house, so my iPod is now like my personal access point to the universe in every place within 100 ft (~30m for you metric types) of my router. And I have really pushed the thing to its limit, noticing stuff like my own home blog doesn't render at all in the iPod Safari browser due to that site's heavy reliance on Flash to do a lot of the dirty work.

So, note to Apple: iPod/iPhone needs Flash support.

But that said, you can obviously read this blog -- the one you are reading right now -- in your iPhone/iPod without many problems, but it takes like 500 years to load, and then you have to zoom in and scroll, and blablahblah. Yes: it looks very nice, but suddenly we're back in 1999 when bandwidth was a major consideration in web design and the old rules about content start rearing their ugly heads.

So what to do? How does this get fixed?

Honestly: I'm working on a way to redirect your mobile device to a mobile-friendly feed which still gives you the graphics and stuff but in a way which doesn't cause you to shake your iPhone in such a way that DHS will show up at your house and take it into protective custody. But until that work bears fruit, my suggestion is that you link your mobile device to our built-in ATOM feed for the blog, which your iPhone/iPod will handle very well, and leave all the in-line graphics in tact. I know: you will miss the rotating TeamPyro logos and all the sidebar stuff if you do this. That is why I am working on a better solution than merely grabbing the raw feed. However, until then, no sense in punishing yourself.

I'm sure I have something deeper than that to say after listening to R.C. Sproul expound on the curse motif, but it won't come to me until I stop trying to cough up a lung.

Carry on.

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Well, lookie there: my Proverbs thesis

by Dan Phillips

Ted Hildebrandt is Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, and author of numerous books and articles (the links are only a sampling). He's producing a genuinely impressive list of Biblical e-sources.

Being, as you may have noticed, a lover of Proverbs, I was really very impressed with Dr. Hildebrandt's list of Proverbs resources. His invitation to contribute emboldened me to drop the good doctor a line, mentioning my 1983 Master's thesis on Proverbs. Ted responded very graciously, which led to my discovery that I owned the rights to my own thesis (I'd feared I didn't) — and, ultimately, to the scanning of it into e-form.

And now, voila! The Sovereignty of Yahweh in the Book of Proverbs: an Exercise in Theological Exegesis is now online.

Consequently, anyone who wants to can read the thesis as an html web page, as an Adobe pdf document, or as a Word document.

I actually had a lot of fun researching and writing that thesis. My typist complained with a smile that half of it was in the footnotes.

Boy, just saying "typist" is a retro-clue, isn't it? Children, a "typist" was a person who used to use something called a "typewriter" to "type" things out. There were professionals who could type better and faster, and they did this for money. My late mother typed for detectives, repossessors, students; she could type over 100 words a minute on her IBM Selectric. This was in the days before many people had computers, back when I thought it was a fad. Some of the faculty at Talbot were experimentally using a thing called a Kaypro II, which was a portable computer. It was green screen, no graphics; and printers at the time were clunky dot-matrix, or fixed-type printers. Then there was this big, grossly-overpriced high-tech Etch-a-Sketch called a "Mac"....

But I digress.

So she complained with a chuckle that I'd loaded most of it in the footnotes. You see, children, "footnotes" used to be difficult to do. Typists and type-setters had to do all sorts of calculations to accommodate for them. But they did, because, of course, it was best for both writer and reader. Now both writers and publishers can do footnotes with a click of a button, and the software does the rest. Which is why "endnotes" are such a repellent abomination.

Oops, another digression. So, as I was saying:

At the time, my argument was a bit bold, though it may not seem so to y'all. I argued that the best course towards any solid understanding of Proverbs lay directly through dealing respectfully with the text itself, rather than letting a hostile philosophy dictate the concoction of an independent historical/ideological template, which was then imposed upon the text. I sought to demonstrate that, if one takes the text seriously and treats it with respect, it not only produces a coherent portrait, but gives solid ground for meaningful exegesis and exposition.

I presented my thesis' argument at a meeting of OT professors at Talbot Theological Seminary. Faculty elsewhere heard of it, and one well-known scholar contacted me, asking for a copy. He was working on a very substantial commentary on Proverbs for a well-known series that was in process.

I was delighted to say "Yes!" There simply wasn't any commentary on Proverbs that was in-depth, scholarly, substantial, recent, and written from a Bible-believing perspective. This fellow was a conservative OT scholar, and he said he wanted to interact with the thesis in his commentary. Of course, I was thrilled — (A) that a Bible-believer was going to do a substantial commentary on Proverbs, and (B) that he thought my thesis worth mention.

After that, year after year, I watched for that commentary to come out. The due date came and went. Nothing. Years continued to come and go, still no commentary. Every time any book on Proverbs or the OT came out, even though it was probably silly, I checked the bibliography, hoping against hope that maybe the writer had come across my little thesis and thought it worth a mention.

Nope. Never.

I finally wrote the professor who was working on the Proverbs commentary, and expressed interest in a progress report. To my chagrin, I learned that he'd dropped out of the project. Worse, Proverbs had been assigned to someone else, to a scholar who — to say the least — affirms neither the inerrancy nor the sufficiency of the text. He ultimately produced what is at very best a mediocre commentary.

And, given his doctrinal positions, it is no surprise that he doesn't refer to my thesis. Folks of his ilk generally don't even indicate awareness that there is another position.

So now my baby's up online, and anyone with a connection to the internet can see what I was so jazzed about, 25 years ago. If you've got a background in OT academics, maybe you'll chuckle; or maybe you'll see that some of the ideas that I argued as revolutionary at the time are more broadly accepted and better argued today. But in the twists and turns of Providence, I didn't get to be much of a direct participant in those developments.

At any rate, and for what it's worth, it's not buried in a university library anymore.

And for that, I'm very grateful.

Now... you know that.

(PS — my 2007 seminar on Proverbs is also on that same page, plus a truckload of great resources. Be sure to check it out.)

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Too Busy to Say Much...

by Phil Johnson

'm just back from the Dallas area and too busy to blog properly today. But I wanted to point you to a friend's blog. Doug McMasters is pastor of Trinity Road Chapel, Upper Tooting. That's a London-area church within short walking distance of the home where Spurgeon lived for several years. Spurgeon helped inaugurate Trinity Road Chapel.

Anyway, Doug has been posting some selections from the 1894 isue of The Sword and the Trowel. These articles were initially published two years after Spurgeon's death, and they include some letters, rare sermon excerpts, and other items of interest not published during Spurgeon's lifetime. Enjoy, and I'll pick up the Acts 17 series later this week, Lord willing.



PS:

My friend and favorite radio talk-show personality Todd Friel started a new daily television program today: "Wretched." That's the name of the program, not my assessment of it. It's on FamilyNet, which means as far as I can discover, it's not on DirectTV, so I can't watch. But check it out if you get FamilyNet.

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Trivial Pursuit

by Phil Johnson



ll week the blogposts here have been lighter-than usual fare. And I'm OK with that. Especially this week. I did not need a high-maintenance brouhaha in the comment-threads this week. I had several loose ends at the office to tie up, including getting the final revisions for A Tale of Two Sons inserted into the manuscript and sent back to the publisher, and a stack of other things that needed doing.

The weekend finds me in Springfield, IL, where I'm speaking at a weekend conference at Southern View Chapel, pastored by one of my very favorite writers, Gary Gilley. I also spent the morning with my longtime friend (and the world's foremost expert on the history of hyper-Calvinism), Curt Daniel. So today was a great day, but I didn't get to blog, and Friday is unofficially supposed to be my day.

So let me partially atone for that omission with a post that touches on several more or less trivial things I wouldn't otherwise bother to blog about:

Letitia is an occasional commenter here at PyroManiacs. She usually takes the opposing view against our critiques of Emerging shenanigans, and she attends The Journey, a church in St. Louis that's part of the Acts 29 Network. But she's always friendly and polite, and a welcome participant in our combox. She e-mailed to inform me that her church's lead pastor, Darrin Patrick, will be delivering the Fall Lecture Series for the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis tomorrow. And he'll be making use of the Po-Motivator® posters. I don't imagine that could possibly mean anything good for us. I wish I could be there. I'm only an hour away. But I have this prior commitment.

Facebook. Yeah, I got on Facebook to try to manage personal messages from blogreaders. Our spam filters are aggressive, and since I asked for feedback about the blogroll, I didn't want to have those messages siphoned off as spam before I saw them. So I have systematically added everyone who has asked to be my Facebook friend, whether I know you or not. (Actually, I declined one or two people whose names I recognized because in the past they have deliberately tried to be thorns in the flesh.) But I think I have dealt with every reasonable friend request and added everyone to the blogroll who met the conditions. However, I didn't notice until I'd OKed about 45 friend requests that it's possible to attach a comment to the friend request, so there may have been some blogroll info I missed. So if you requested to be on the blogroll and are qualified to be there, but I somehow haven't added you yet, message me again on Facebook, and I'll try to get you this time. Please don't send intricate theological questions or requests for detailed feedback to my Facebook page. I don't have time to use the Facebook page like that. Look at it as a personal supplement to the blog. Write graffiti on my wall, poke me, post interesting (and tasteful) pictures, videos, or whatever. I'll read whatever's there, but I just can't reply to most of it. So don't think me rude if you post the funniest joke of your life and I ignore it. Just know that I prolly thought it was pretty funny. But I'm not going to write about it.

Osteen. Everything I would say about the guy has already been said—except for one: I'm amazed that so little has been said about Osteen's comment near the middle of the interview, when the representative of this humanistic network news program summarized Osteen's Christless message in these very words: "To become a better you, you must be positive towards yourself, develop better relationships, embrace the place where you are. Not one mention of God in that. Not one mention of Jesus Christ in that. . . " and Osteen acknowledged that description, then replied: "That's just my message. There is scripture in there that backs it all up. But I feel like, Byron, I'm called to help people . . . how do we walk out the Christian life? How do we live it? And these are principles that can help you. I mean, there's a lot better people qualified to say, 'Here's a book that going to explain the scriptures to you.' I don't think that's my gifting." Isn't that an admission from his own lips that he doesn't fit the basic biblical qualifications to be a pastor in the first place?

My lawn. I forgot to mow before I left. And I have board meetings in Bradenton, FL, Monday and Tuesday before I get back home. So if you live in my neighborhood, don't look at my lawn this week. Better yet, stop by and mow it for me.

See you next week.

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As Good as It Gets

posted by Phil Johnson

arely do I put sound files on the blog, so when I do, you know it's a good one. You've got to hear this.


The sound clip linked below was recorded last Saturday (thanks to Bill Fickett). It's from KFI 640 ("More stimulating talk radio"). That's a secular all-talk station and probably the largest Clear Channel radio station on the West Coast—not a source where you'd normally expect to hear a lesson about divine providence. But it's a good one.

Some facts about this story before you listen:

1. Johnny MacArthur is John MacArthur's eldest grandson. He's a high-school senior this year and a scratch golfer with a full-ride golf scholarship to Pepperdine next year.
   
2. Johnny is a senior, playing football for the first time in his high-school career. Of course, many well-meaning friends and conservative grown-ups advised him not to go out for football because of the risk of an injury that could jeopardize his scholarship. He tried out and made the team anyway.
   
3. Hart and Canyon High Schools have one of the fiercest rivalries ever in US high-school football. Johnny plays for Hart High School. Canyon was last year's state champ in football. (Canyon's stadium is down the hill from my back yard. I hear their marching band practicing in the mornings. Hart, across the valley, is this community's oldest high school, named for William S. Hart, an early cowboy actor, who founded the Western film studios that originally built this community.)
   
4. I suppose many Pyro readers will have heard about the terrible truck accident that occurred in the Newhall Pass on I-5 Friday night. It made national news and Fred Butler blogged about it. The accident site is also close by my house. (In fact, a straight line from Canyon's football stadium to the truck accident would intersect my house.)

So anyway, here's the sound file. Listen to that clip first (and stay with it all the way to the end), lest the ending be spoiled for you. But then here's a video of the key moment in the football game.

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So... who are we going to see in Tulsa?

by Dan Phillips

This post rated "E" for Eminently Bumpable
(or even replaceable)

My two betters and I plan to be at the Founder's Conference this week (see side-bar), enjoying the fellowship and the speakers — and being seen together in the same place for the first time, ever!

(I just hope I don't get voted off the island.)

Who else plans to come?

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