Moving

Hi friends, family and others who might read this blog periodically!  I have been working with this blog for a few months now, and thought that I might like to continue with it and have a little more control over what I do with the site.  So, I recently registered the blog with its own url and will continue there.  It looks mostly the same, but having the .com allows me more freedom to play around with it and try different things.  The new site is www.madeusalive.com.  I hope to see you over there!

Ecclesiastical Latin, John 5:25

…venit hora et nunc est…  Jn. v, 25

This week’s entry, from exercises in Ecclesiastical Latin in John F. Collins’ A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin, is from John 5:25.  It comes in the middle of a segment where Jesus is proclaiming his authority as coming from the Father.  Here is the segment of the verse again from the Latin Vulgate which I read and translated, with my translation of it, and then of the entire verse in English (ESV), followed by some grammar points:

Apostles’ Creed, Article 5: God the Son

Article 5: God the Son

English:

the third day he rose from the dead;

Latin:

tertia die resurrexit a mortuis;

Greek:

τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ ἀναστάντα ἀπὸ τῶν νεκρῶν,

(tē tritē hēmera anastanta apo tōn nekrōn,)

“Ten Hours Over Your Books”

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was a conservative professor of theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921.  He was part of what students and professors at Westminster Seminary like to call “Old Princeton,” referring to the days before the seminary became liberal in its theology, and the conservative Bible scholars left a generation later to form Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  More information about him can be found here.

Here is a great quote by B. B. Warfield from “The Religious Life of Theological Students.”  Actually, the whole essay seems like a great quote!  Westminster Seminary California gave new students this short essay at our new student orientation, and in it Warfield reminds us that we need not create a false dichotomy between theological study and personal piety:

Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. ‘What!’ is the appropriate response, ‘than ten hours over your books, on your knees?’ Why should you turn from God when you turn to your books, or feel that you must turn from your books in order to turn to God? If learning and devotion are as antagonistic as that, then the intellectual life is in itself accursed, and there can be no question of a religious life for a student, even of theology…Put your heart into your studies; do not merely occupy your mind with them, but put your heart into them. They bring you daily and hourly into the very presence of God; his ways, his dealing with men, the infinite majesty of his Being form their very subject-matter (pp. 2, 6).

Book Review/Reflection – Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching

Copyright 2003 by Judith E. Lingenfelter and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter. Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching published by Baker Academic. Publisher permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

I lived and taught overseas at an international Christian school in Tianjin, China for four years.  After returning to the States and starting graduate studies at Westminster Seminary California, one of the first courses I took was one covering ministry in Asia and Asian-American contexts.  One of the professors required us to read and write a review/reflection based on the book Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational  Model for Learning and Teaching, by Judith E. Lingenfelter and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter.  I enjoyed and greatly benefited from it, and would like to include that review/reflection here to encourage others, especially educators, to read it as it has good theological implications for education, and it is short, which is a plus for educational books!

Exhortations from Three Johns

I wanted to share a word of exhortation from three Johns: J(ohn). Gresham Machen, John Owen, and John Piper – one whom I have read more than the other two, one whom I probably should read more than the other two, and one whose legacy has affected my life and seminary study practically speaking more than the other two.  However, whether the priority of alphabetical order of their names or the chronology of their timelines mirrors the priority of the profundity of their theology or not, I was encouraged by what they all wrote, and how what they wrote was combined by John Piper in a recent book of his, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright.

Planned Book Review – The Meeting of the Waters: 7 Global Currents That Will Propel the Future Church

I recently finished a new and different book on missions – The Meeting of the Waters: 7 Global Currents That Will Propel the Future Church, by Fritz Kling, which has been touted by Tim Keller, no less, as “basic reading not only for all Christians involved in global missions but also for any believers trying to reach out to their own city” (Meeting, 1).  It is endorsed by many others as well as a must-read book on how Global Missions and the Global Church must respond and react to our modern world and its trends of globalization if it wants to succeed.  I disagree.

The Meeting of the (Shallow) Waters

“Social justice” is all the rage in Christian circles today.  It shows up in the blogosphere constantly, and a simple walk into a Christian book store will show that this is the case with books like The Poverty and Justice Bible showcased prominently on display tables.  It is everywhere in Christian books, and I just read about it in a new book that discusses the global church and missions.

In The Meeting of the Waters: 7 Global Currents That Will Propel the Future Church, author Fritz Kling states,

[The] future church will need to find its voice in a wider-than-ever range of issues, like poverty, human rights, ecology, justice, conflict, equality, reconciliation, and global events (Meeting, (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010), 24).

Catechizing the Cute, Question 3

3.Q. Why did God make you and all things?
A. For his own glory (Ps 19:1; Jer 9:23, 24; Rv 4:11; 4:15).

I wrote before about how we are beginning the process of catechizing Madelyn, educating her in the questions and answers of a historic Reformed Baptist catechism for children.  We had worked on questions 1 and 2, and still review those nightly with her in addition to prayer and Bible reading.  At this stage, we do not expect any comprehension yet, only response by memory.  However, our desire and prayer is that at a young age the vocabulary and answers will be embedded in her mind, which God will use to convict her of sin through His Law, to communicate to her the Gospel of Christ by the Holy Spirit, and upon which He can later build.

Job Confronts the Emergent Church, Part 2

With the Emergent themes having been stated in the previous part of this post, let me now turn attention to some observations from the book of Job.  Job’s three friends – Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar – have already arrived and are deep into their various interpretations of Job’s situation.  I imagine the three of them sitting together with Job, dialoguing, as today’s Emergents might.  They might have had couches, camels and coffee.