Nitsav over at Faith Promoting Rumor has provided a great post for an upcoming Hebrew tool.

It is definitely worthy of your money.

But in regards to the two Hebrew scholars, Phil Brown and Bryan Smith, they are a little sketchy.

(laughing)  Of course, they will tell you to never ever trust an Idaho spud named E. T. Wood.

Are these sufficient answers?

They have just been given a megaphone.  Why the lack of passion?  It looks like the sly calculating of business men over what they should answer. (more…)

An LDS apostle has recently acknowledged Bookslinger and the power of missionary zeal through internet weblogs. (more…)

Recently, Blake Ostler got me thinking about social trinitarianism.

A Christian brother just emailed me today this critique.  Michael Rea has been thinking other thoughts in regards to the social trinitarian paradigm.

Here I am posting a paper, sourced from the University of Notre Dame.  What is Brad going to think of me over at Defensor Veritatis?

I must say, though, the paper was very interesting.

If you were to visit our church on any given Sunday, the front page of the church bulletin would have these three words:

Always the Word”

I think I picked that mantra up from a Chuck Colson book that I read a long while back.  I like it.  It places authority above fallible church hierarchy in the written word that unveils the living Word. 

If you think it is a prideful, exclusionary statement, well, it is.   Who is greater than the Word?  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

From now on, I will be posting on AlwaystheWord.org, sermon and Bible study snippets (from Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday nights), alongside other posts.  Stay tuned.

LDS friends, here is a different window:

Four Big Descriptions about the Messiah

You can also find our church website’s posts in the links at the bottom of the HI4LDS sidebar.

Listen to who is giving us the latest insights into the secrets of Christianity.  Various stories of Christianity are being told.  Who do you think of “America’s biblical scholars” are telling the truth?  Or do you think they are all telling the truth?

Special Issue – U.S. News & World Report (keep on sale through March 11, 2008) (more…)

Ok.

The alarm clock woke me up early this morning.  I spent the first five minutes figuring out who am I? and where am I? (more…)

I read this article today, and didn’t like it one bit. 

“And Lead Us Not” (pp. 28-30) in Harper’s Magazine (December 2007)

[“By David Lewis and Philip Kitcher, from “Divine Evil” in Philosophers Without Gods, published in August by Oxford University Press.  Lewis, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, was the author of several books, including Counterfactuals and On the Plurality of Worlds.  The essay is based on an outline he wrote before his death in 2001.  Kitcher is a professor of philosophy at Columbia.”] 

Standard versions of the Argument from Evil concern the evils God fails to prevent:  the pain and suffering of human beings and the sins people commit.  The most ambitious versions of the argument claim that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and completely benevolent deity.  In my view, this version succeeds conclusively.  But I think the usual philosophical discussions of the problem of evil are a sideshow.  What interests me here is a simpler argument, one that has been strangely neglected.

 

We might start instead from the evils God himself perpetrates.  In duration and intensity, these dwarf the kinds of suffering and sin to which the standard versions allude.  For God has prescribed torment for insubordination.  The punishment is to go on forever, and the agonies to be endured by the damned intensify, in unimaginable ways, the sufferings we undergo in our earthly lives.  In both dimensions, time and intensity, the torment is infinitely worse than all the suffering and sin that will have occurred during the history of life in the universe.  What God does is thus infinitely worse than what the worst of tyrants have done.

Before we continue, do LDS friends believe this logic?   First, I believe that the Bible teaches the existence of evil and that God is powerful, knowing, and loving.  Do I understand it all?  No, but I trust the God who both knew all about the evil that engulfed his celestial and terrestrial creation and the Son’s body that would be sacrificed on account of the evil.  Here are several reasons Jesus died:  1) “that he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil;” 2) that he might “deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” 3) and that he might “make reconciliation for the sins of the people” (a propitiation – a sacrifice to appease the Father who hates moral evil and is radically opposed).  Truly, no evil tyrant has voluntarily died for his enemies that they might live as revealed by the incomprehensible act of love displayed by this eternal Ruler. (more…)

Would you like to know what magazines I read?  I couldn’t resist this quote I saw today from a Salt Lake City local luminary and Baptist preacher.

Salt Lake Magazine (December 2007)

The magazine features (p. 117) a number of funny and serious quotes by Pastor France Davis (I don’t know the man) of Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City.  Here are a couple serious ones.

People tend to work together better and more when they feel pressure or exclusion from a dominant group.  So here in Utah, groups of Baptist, Methodists, Catholics and Episcopalians talk to each other more than they would do in a place where they’re more evenly dispersed.” (more…)

Thanks Geoff B. for the tip.