24 August 2008
The first of several planned papers on liturgical matters, “Against Liturgy-Bashing” attempts to clear away the nonsense that plagues our thinking in many American churches. To bring it closer to home: our local church is in desperate need of liturgical reform, and we cannot even begin to build a God-honoring liturgy until we have cleared away the underbrush of the pagan ideas that harden our necks and soften our heads. To that end, this paper addresses several common objections to liturgical worship. Two excerpts:
Does the leading of the Spirit require spontaneity rather than planning? Again, we can return to the commands to sing in order to see the fallacy here. Imagine if we all just got together, and on the count of three, all began to sing whatever words happened to pop into our heads, set to Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Tim Nichols
17 August 2008
If you had to be stuck on a desert island for [life, ten years, or some other long period of time], what books would you want with you?”
It’s a common thought experiment, and usually the occasion of much consideration and discussion. If you hang out with the more passionate readers, as I often do, it will also be the occasion of heated debate. Yesterday, I happened upon an interesting twist on it, and I’d like to share it.
So get out your pen and paper, and here we go.
No, seriously, get out a pen and paper. (Or open a Word document, or whatever). You’ll thank me later.
The challenge is to answer the standard question, as stated above, but with two additional conditions. First, all your physical needs are taken care of, so assume you have no pragmatic need for medical texts, homesteading reference books, etc. This is strictly life-of-the-mind stuff. (Of course, if you enjoy reading medical texts, that’s another thing…) Second, you have only two minutes to answer, starting right now.
Go. Tick tock.
Done? Good. I’d love to hear your list. This was mine: Read the rest of this entry »
Comments Off on Desert Island Reading | Classics, Meditations | Tagged: Christianity, church history, Classics, great books, philosophy, theology, western canon | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols
10 August 2008
The opening chapters of How to Read Genesis by Tremper Longman III are pretty good. So when I got to chapter four, titled “Myth or History? Genesis and the Enuma Elish” I was excited. I had just recently engaged an unbeliever on the question of whether the biblical stories — or at least the supernatural ones — were myth or history, and I have also long been intrigued by the contrasts between Genesis and Enuma Elish. I was looking forward to seeing Longman’s take on it.
I’m sorry to say that I was sorely disappointed. Longman writes:
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9 Comments | Meditations, Reviews | Tagged: Bible, Christianity, creation, Enuma Elish, Genesis, gnosticism, James Jordan, theology, Tremper Longman, worldview | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols
27 July 2008
For my birthday, my darling wife bought me three presents: Cantus Christi, the accompanying CD set, and a 4-sermon series titled The Worship of the Saints. I’m going to review the first two here. The sermon series is definitely worth reviewing, but I’m still recovering from my shock. I’ll have to get to it later.
Cantus is a serious effort to recover psalm-singing in the church, as the proportion of the book devoted to the psalms demonstrates (196 out of 440 pages).
The single biggest challenge in psalm-singing is that while God gives us the words, He has not been pleased to preserve the original music. A saint who would sing psalms — as we are all commanded to do (Eph. 5:19, Col. 3:16, Jam.5:13) — must somehow come up with the music by which to sing them. Happily, this does not mean we have to write all the music ourselves.
Over the centuries, many saints have encountered this same challenge, and have written or adapted music for the psalms. Accordingly, Cantus is also a serious attempt to mine the wealth of the Western Church’s musical tradition. The music for the psalms relies heavily on the Genevan Psalter and other early Reformation musical sources, and the hymn tunes go back as far as A.D. 800. Psalm tunes include metrical songs (hymns that ordinary folks can sing without Read the rest of this entry »
3 Comments | How To, liturgy, music, Reviews | Tagged: Christianity, church music, congregational music, hymnal, hymnody, hymns, psalm-singing, psalms, psalter, singing, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols
15 July 2008
It seemed appropriate to add a little more about the nature of my approach to apologetics, since what we’ll be doing is a little uncommon.
My basic orientation on apologetics is that it’s all of a piece with theology, evangelism, and culture. Having a gleefully Christian take on everything from anchovy migration patterns to Zulu cooking is an integral part of defending the faith, not to mention a very persuasive witness in itself. Of course, no one person can know about everything, so learning how to construct a Christian approach to the subject at hand is terribly important.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
13 July 2008
A local church here has agreed to host a four-week series on apologetics, taught by yours truly and starting this coming Friday (18 July), 7-9 pm in Orange, CA. Sorry about the short notice; we just got the details nailed down Friday night.
I’m titling the series “Biblical Apologetics for Busy Believers.” A rough, and tentative, outline follows:
Session 1: Start with God (Genesis 1-3) — All thinking must start with God, and the nature of God’s claims is such that no one can be neutral. A Christian must always begin with this understanding; to fail to start everything with God’s revelation is to make the same mistake that Eve made in the Garden of Eden. (As an example, we’ll consider a Christian response to the claim that there’s no good historical evidence for Jesus.)
Session 2: Without Excuse (Romans 1) — Unbelief has no excuse whatsoever; the unbeliever really does know the Christian God. To the extent that he refuses to acknowledge the triune God of the Bible, his Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Tim Nichols
13 July 2008
If you’re looking for encyclopedic, facts-and-figures resources, there’s a ton of them on the market, and Josh McDowell’s material is still some of the best. A recent publication, Evidence for Christianity, combines and updates the evidential material from a number of previous works, and that’s the one I’d recommend, if you haven’t already got a few of McDowell’s works on the shelf.
Facts and figures are important, but in this post I want to address resources for how you use them. McDowell was never the best source for this — he’s more of the “make a bigger pile” school of thought. Until very recently, all the really good basic instruction on how to use the facts was on audio, but there wasn’t a book that did the job effectively and accessibly. Gary DeMar at American Vision has changed all that by transcribing and editing a series of talks Greg Bahnsen did for high school and college students back in the early nineties. The resulting book, Pushing the Antithesis: The Apologetic Methodology of Greg L. Bahnsen, is a gem. It’s accessible, relatively simple, and it has study questions at the end of each chapter. It’s also a little spendy, but it’s worth it. Bahnsen’s other basic book, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, is cheaper, but it’s a set of course syllabi edited together by Robert Booth. It’s much denser, and because the material was designed to be accompanied by live instruction, it’s much harder to plow through without help. Thanks to Pushing the Antithesis, the necessary help is now available in print.
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Comments Off on Basic Resources for Apologetics: An Overview | Apologetics, Reviews | Tagged: Apologetics, Christianity, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Stein, Greg Bahnsen, Josh McDowell, presuppositional apologetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols
6 July 2008
Commentary and translation choices are always tricky. The Bible has inspired a lot of comment and translation over the years, and a surprising amount has been poorly done. Nowhere is this more true than with the Song of Solomon.
The first and most blatant problem is the number of interpreters whose starting point is a red-faced “It can’t possibly be saying that!!! So they gin up a flimsy excuse and explain how the Song is really about Christ’s love for the church.
Apparently the church has captivating hair, an intoxicating navel, and really nice breasts (Song 7:1-5). Of course, the real problem with this view is not the patent absurdity of it — and it is absurd — but the starting premise. Why shouldn’t the Song be exactly what it sounds like — a frank celebration of married love in all its complexity, delicacy, and lush sensual splendor?
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Tim Nichols
22 June 2008
For those of you who last checked in with biblical counseling when Jay Adams was in his psychology-skewering heyday, you need to come have another look. The present generation of spokesmen for biblical counseling offers a more well-rounded, richer grasp of Scripture and a much more sober-minded tone. While there certainly was some justification for Adams’ jeremiads, the present generation seems to have rediscovered the value and utility of brotherly kindness, a mode of interaction sadly lacking in the early writings of the movement.
Of the present voices, one of the clearest and most articulate is David Powlison.
Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition through the Lens of Scripture is not a “counseling model” as such. It is to a counseling model what a list of mountaintop elevations is to a topographic map of the entire mountain range: it touches on the high points, and leaves the rest alone. But this seemingly incomplete way of teaching turns out to be surprisingly instructive.
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Comments Off on Seeing with New Eyes | Reviews | Tagged: biblical counseling, CCEF, Christian Counseling and Education Foundation, Christian life, Christianity, counseling, David Powlison, practical theology, psychology, theology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols
15 June 2008
I recently renewed my acquaintance with John Donne’s Devotions, an outstanding work I first met as a senior in high school. As it always does, the closing passage from Meditation XVII really struck me.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
(The bold emphasis is mine.)
Comments Off on John Donne on Suffering | Chrestomathy, Classics, Reviews | Tagged: Christianity, Devotions, John Donne, Meditation XVII, sickness, spirituality, suffering, tribulation | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols
Full Contact Christianity 
Anti-Gnostic Song of Solomon Translations and Commentaries
6 July 2008Commentary and translation choices are always tricky. The Bible has inspired a lot of comment and translation over the years, and a surprising amount has been poorly done. Nowhere is this more true than with the Song of Solomon.
The first and most blatant problem is the number of interpreters whose starting point is a red-faced “It can’t possibly be saying that!!! So they gin up a flimsy excuse and explain how the Song is really about Christ’s love for the church.
Apparently the church has captivating hair, an intoxicating navel, and really nice breasts (Song 7:1-5). Of course, the real problem with this view is not the patent absurdity of it — and it is absurd — but the starting premise. Why shouldn’t the Song be exactly what it sounds like — a frank celebration of married love in all its complexity, delicacy, and lush sensual splendor?
Read the rest of this entry »