Jesus Christ, Stumbling Block to the Jew
So central was this emphasis on the Messiahship of Jesus that within a few years ‘Christ’ (the Greek for Messiah) had ceased to designate Jesus’s function and had come to be a sort of surname. Now all this was peculiarly offensive to the Jew. It was not easy to think of a carpenter-teacher as the [...]
Greek in the Spread of Early Christianity
From Michael Green’s classic Evangelism in the Early Church: The advantages for the Christian mission of having a common language can hardly be overestimated. It did away with the necessity for missionary language schools. Missionaries using it would incur none of the odium that English-speaking missionaries might find in some of the underdeveloped countries; for [...]
Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan
This story is one of the saddest things I have ever heard. Chinese and Japanese teenagers, who now use their phones and computers very heavily to communicate, are beginning to have a very hard time remember how to write the different characters of their language. Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising [...]
Evangelicals should become more Protestant, not more Catholic
Jonathan Fitzgerald chronicles an increasing trend among evangelicals: frequent conversions to Catholicism. He writes: Croslow’s interest in Catholicism began over six years ago when he was a sophomore in high school. At the time, Croslow’s Midwestern evangelical church experienced a crisis that is all too common among evangelical churches: what he describes as “a crisis [...]
New Angle on Tiananmen Square Tank Man
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the famous Tiananmen Square Protests, from which came this picture: Interestingly, a new photograph has surfaced which captures the same man from a different angle: You can see the man in the top left of the photograph, between the two trees. This is a pretty cool photograph, especially given [...]
Different Regiments of the Same Army
I have been thoroughly enjoying Perry Miller’s The Life of the Mind in America, which presents a highly complex picture of early American Christianity. One of the interesting issues he describes is the unique way in which Christians in America achieved a form of unity. On the one hand, Miller credits the absence of an [...]
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Revival
I have been reading the second volume of Iain Murray’s comprehensive biography on D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, having read the first volume last year. It is a bit tedious at times, but only because Murray made the conscious choice to include more, rather than less, “in part because of the thought that writers on Dr Lloyd-Jones [...]
Reagan vs. Kuyper vs. Obama
As some of you know, I went through a long phase where I was a huge fan of Ronald Reagan. I still am, to a large degree, but I no longer actively collect biographies written about him or things like that. In fact, the more I think about Reagan’s political philosophy, the more I agree [...]
How to Calculate the Best College Football Team Ever
This was a really interesting statistical method of evaluating teams across history, and I think that it should settle the question once and for all: the 1995 Nebraska Cornhuskers were the best college football team ever to play the game. But I’m still a little offended at the absolute lack of professionalism and class displayed [...]
Unresolved Issues
In the first day of my Doctrine of the Church class, which is taught by a Lutheran, this exchange occurred when we were discussing our denominational tradition: Student: I grew up as a Mennonite, which means that your people used to burn my people. Professor: Well, only for political reasons; it would be inappropriate to [...]
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