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June 30, 2009 Matthew Cochrane, Deal of the Week: Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible
A few days ago, I was talking to my brother when the subject of B.B. Warfield came up, the esteemed nineteenth century Princeton Seminary Principal and Reformed theologian. My brother remarked he was looking for an article Warfield had written but was having a hard time locating it. I responded I had recently purchased a ten volume set of Warfield’s works and would try to locate the obscure article within my set and, if successful, could easily scan a copy of the text and email it. My brother was surprised, not so much that I might have the article on hand, but had freed up the resources necessary to purchase such a set. He was astounded when I told him I was able to purchase the entire set for under fifty dollars.
A little more than a year ago this blog became an affiliate of the website, www.christianbook.com. I did it because: 1) It cost me nothing; and 2) I am a frequent and regular customer.
The deals on some of the reference materials on their site are simply sensational, and allow regular Joe’s like me to be able to purchase ten volume sets of B.B. Warfield or exhaustive concordances or pictorial Biblical encyclopedia sets. These materials are great if you’re in the ministry, lead a small group Bible study or simply want to study the Bible more effectively. For this reason, from time to time, I am going to begin to highlight some great deals they have on this site. I’ll call it the “Deal of the Week” but will invariably post far less than just one per week.
This week I would like to highlight the five-volume Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible. I own this set and, besides my Logos software, have probably used it more than any other reference material I own. It contains a wealth of information inside and usually presents the different theological perspectives on different topics in a fair and objective manner. The contents include pictures, illustrations, graphs and other helpful tools. I want to say something like, “…and right now, for a limited time only, you can purchase this set for the low low price of $39.99!” but that just sounds too much like a cheap TV shill.
That being said, forty bucks to purchase an awesome set like this is an amazing bargain and you’d be foolish to pass up the opportunity. Here’s the set’s product description:
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The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, 5 Volumes
By Edited by Merrill C. Tenney / Zondervan
One of the most comprehensive and reliable Bible encyclopedias available today! Offering a library of information, it features quality contributions from more than 200 outstanding evangelical scholars, 1,500 photographs and illustrations, as well as nearly 300 maps. Valuable bibliographies and helpful cross-references round out this user-friendly resource. Approx. 5000 pages total, five hardcovers. |
I promise I will only highlight material I either already own or am currently buying. If it’s not a good deal enough for me to spend my own money on, then I will not presume to advise you to spend yours toward a certain product.
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June 26, 2009 Matthew Cochrane, Video of the Week: Paul Washer on Total Depravity
This week, Governor Mark Sanford admitted he had cheated on his wife by having an affair with a woman living in Argentina. The sordid details can be found virtually anywhere on the web so I do not feel compelled to repeat them here. I believe Sanford should step down for his actions, not only for his appalling lack of character, but for his dereliction of duty. He flew out of the country and left his staff and the rest of the leadership in South Carolina no clue on his whereabouts. The news saddened and shocked me. But I should have known better.
One thing I wanted to address, however, is some of the things I’ve heard and read since Sanford admitted his infidelity. I’ve heard a number of people tell me that they would absolutely never do this sort of thing. I’ve heard other people tell me that they were quite certain their favorite politician or religious leader could never do anything as despicable as this. I’ve heard other people comment that this was proof Sanford’s religion was fake and that he had just used it as a façade for political gain.
Now, I have no idea if Sanord’s religious beliefs are authentic or not. I have no special insight on that matter. What I do know is that all sin and all are capable of committing heinous crimes – including myself. I also know that Christians are just as capable of sinning as others and that Sanford's actions, as deplorable as they are, do not reflect the authenticity of his faith. In lieu of sharing a quote this week, I thought I would post this video on mankind’s sinful and totally depraved nature.
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June 23, 2009 Matthew Cochrane, From the Depths of the Web, June 2009
Here’s this week’s series of links to the weird, strange, uplifting, and fascinating items from the depths of the World Wide Web:
David Dockery, editor of the new book Southern Baptist Identity, believes “Southern Baptists are at once beneficiaries and victims of tradition.” He states:
We have been blessed as Southern Baptists by a wonderful heritage that has been characterized by faithfulness to Holy Scripture. For years, Southern Baptists have been called “A People of the Book.” We have also inherited a commitment to missions and evangelism and a spirit of cooperation in our shared work that has been duplicated in few other Christian movements over the past century. Thus we are beneficiaries who receive nurturing truth and wisdom from God’s faithfulness that has been passed on to us from previous generations.
We are also victims by assuming that certain programs and strategies are the only way that these commitments to missions and evangelism can be carried out. We have substituted a cultural homogeneity for genuine biblical fellowship, and a programmatic uniformity for intentional and strategic engagement of the culture and world around us. We now take for granted things that possibly or probably need to be questioned or reexamined.
We are therefore simultaneously beneficiaries of good, wise, and sound traditions, as well as victims of poor, unwise, and unsound traditions.
Scott Anderson’s class at the Marketplace One Leadership Institute recently had the opportunity to spend an hour with Arizona Cardinals’ QB Kurt Warner. Anderson writes:
Kurt seems like the real-deal. Gracious, humble, articulate--a super nice guy. I enjoyed the privilege of hearing him answer questions. The questions ranged from the generic, "How do you define Leadership?” to the specific, "As a believer, how do you deal with salary negotiation?"
Then, it was my turn to ask him a question:
"Kurt, as a professional football player, what aspect of your vocational calling gives you the most joy in life? What is it about the 'job of football' that you love the most?"
His answered came instantly and unequivocally:
"Without question, the greatest joy about my calling as a professional football player is seeing the barriers it breaks-down in giving me the opportunity to talk about Jesus."
He elaborated on this by noting how all the privilege and all the status and all the fame simply serves to give him access to people and places to talk about the Lord that he otherwise would not have had. In essence he made it clear that, to him, the job is an amazing platform from which he gets to steward his main joy in life--telling people about the Jesus.
Environmentally-safe products are not all they are cracked up to be: 98% of “environmentally-friendly” products sold in the U.S. make false or misleading claims.
Literary critic and scholar Leland Ryken refutes the popular notion that Shakespeare is a secular writer. On Reformation21’s website, Ryken writes:
The myth of the secular Shakespeare continues to cast a long shadow over most people's perception of Shakespeare's plays. Until I inherited the Shakespeare course in my department halfway through my career, I assumed that despite certain Christian patterns and occasional biblical allusions in the tragedies, Shakespeare's plays were broadly humanistic in their intellectual allegiance. Nothing has been a bigger surprise in my scholarly career than my gradually coming to regard Shakespeare as a Christian writer.
John Piper talks about why Desiring God’s national conference this year is on John Calvin:
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June 19, 2009 Matthew Cochrane, Quote of the Week: Andrew Peach on Fatherhood
Here is a great quote from a First Things article by James Peach. It is especially relevant given that this Sunday we will be celebrating Father’s Day. Peach writes:
Most fathers-to-be suppose that their old ego-centered lives will continue more or less unabated after the child arrives. With the exception of a few more obstacles and demands on their time, their involvement with their children is envisioned as being something manageable and marginal. Nothing like a complete transformation—an abrupt end to their former life—really enters men’s minds.
But then the onslaught begins, and a man begins to realize that these people, his wife and children, are literally and perhaps even intentionally killing his old self. All around him everything is changing, without any signs of ever reverting back to the way they used to be. Into the indefinite future, nearly every hour of his days threatens to be filled with activities that, as a single-person or even a childless husband, he never would have chosen. Due to the continual interruptions of sleep, he is always mildly fatigued; due to long-term financial concerns, he is cautious in spending, forsaking old consumer habits and personal indulgences; he finds his wife equally exhausted and preoccupied with the children; connections with former friends start to slip away; traveling with his children is like traveling third class in Bulgaria, to quote H.L. Mencken; and the changes go on and on. In short, he discovers, in a terrifying realization, what Dostoevsky proclaimed long ago: “[A]ctive love is a harsh and fearful reality compared with love in dreams.” Fatherhood is just not what he bargained for.
Yet, through the exhaustion, financial stress, screaming, and general chaos, there enters in at times, mysteriously and unexpectedly, deep contentment and gratitude. It is not the pleasure or amusement of high school or college but rather the honor and nobility of sacrifice and commitment, like that felt by a soldier. What happens to his children now happens to him; his life, though awhirl with the trivial concerns of children, is more serious than it ever was before. Everything he does, from bringing home a paycheck to painting a bedroom, has a new end and, hence, a greater significance. The joys and sorrows of his children are now his joys and sorrows; the stakes of his life have risen. And if he is faithful to his calling, he might come to find that, against nearly all prior expectations, he never wants to return to the way things used to be.
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June 17, 2009 Matthew Cochrane, A New World: The Rise of Islam in the West
Current demographic trends in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in America, imply significant concerns for Western Civilization. In recent years birth rates have decreased dramatically in European countries to the point that most European native populations are failing to reproduce at a self-sustaining rate. This trend, coupled with massive Muslim immigration to European countries, means that Europe will probably be a Muslim continent within a generation.
This demographic trend did not happen overnight and, depressingly enough, has probably already reached the point of no return. While sociologists point to a myriad of factors involved in Europe’s vanishing children, most agree that it began in the 1960’s, when Western youth adopted radically different values than their parents. Noah Pollak of Azure, a Jewish journal of serious ideas, writes:
The explanation for Europe's turn from reproducing its civilization is, in fact, as simple and self-contained as how children themselves are viewed. People avoid having children not because they are irreligious, lack financial means, fear the possibility of divorce, or carry university degrees. Rather, people do not have children because they do not want them: They find the curtailment of personal freedom and the assumption of the decades-long obligation inherent in parenthood unattractive, and they do not want to accept the basic restructuring of life that having a family requires. This is not a product of objective economic or social factors; rather, it is a subjective judgment about the meaning and purpose of one's life and the civilization in which that life is lived. It is, ultimately, a moral answer to a moral question: The question of the value people ascribe to their own families and their own heritage, in a broader cultural context.
In other words, people stopped having kids because people stopped wanting kids. For the first time in history, a civilization decided it wasn’t worth it to raise kids if it meant years of changing diapers, financial expenses and the various other headaches childrearing inevitably entails. The couples who do want families now usually stop at a neat and tidy two.
The problem is so glaring that even the mainstream media is sounding the alarm. Last summer, the New York Times Magazine reported:
In the 1990's, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the "replacement rate" -- the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country's current population level. At various times in modern history -- during war or famine -- birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to "low" or "very low" levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, Jose Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari -- the authors of the 2002 report -- saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country's population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: "lowest-low fertility."
To many, "lowest low" is hard evidence of imminent disaster of unprecedented proportions. "The ability to plan the decision to have a child is of course a big success for society, and for women in particular," Letizia Mencarini, a professor of demography at the University of Turin, told me. "But if you would read the documents of demographers 20 years ago, you would see that nobody foresaw that the fertility rate would go so low. In the 1960s, the overall fertility rate in Italy was around two children per couple. Now it is about 1.3, and for some towns in Italy it is less than 1. This is considered pathological."
Meanwhile, the trend has breached the Atlantic and reached the shores of the United States. The American birthrate is currently just 2.1 which, coincidentally, is the lowest birthrate a culture can maintain if it hopes to continue.
While this demographic trend haunts Western culture, Muslims continue to reproduce and immigrate to European countries at astoundingly high rates. The German government has already declared it expects to be a Muslim state by 2050. The French government is so concerned that it has proposed $1,250 monthly stipends for mothers with three children. Yet historians will note these measures as being “too little, too late.”
This video, sent by alert reader Dylan, does a remarkable job of illustrating the problem:
In 732, Charles Martel, nicknamed Charles the Hammer by his troops, stopped cold a seemingly overwhelming Muslim army at the Battle of Tours. Had Martel failed, the advancing Muslim army would undoubtedly have conquered the rest of Gaul and, probably, the rest of Europe. There was no other standing army on the continent remotely capable of stopping the Caliph’s battle-hardened forces. As historian Huston Smith states, “But for their defeat by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in 733, the entire Western world might today be Muslim.”
Since this epic battle was waged over twelve hundred years ago, Europe has had to constantly defend itself against invading Muslim forces from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Greek-Ottoman Empire in the east. Europeans have given their lives to defend their national sovereignty and Christian culture. Because of these sacrifices, Christianity survived in Europe and led to the creation of Western Civilization and the modern world. In Victory of Reason, historian Rodney Stark writes:
Christianity created Western Civilization. Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls. Without a theology committed to reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: A world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists. A world of despots, lacking universities, banks, factories, eyeglasses, chimneys, and pianos. A world where most infants do not live past the age of five and many women die in childbirth – a world truly living in the “dark ages.”
The modern world arose only in Christian societies. Not in Islam. Not in Asia. Not in a “secular” society—there having been none. And all the modernization that has since occurred outside Christendom was imported from the West, often brought by colonizers and missionaries. Even so, many apostles of modernization assume that, given the existing Western example, similar progress can be achieved today not only without Christianity but even without freedom or capitalism—that globalization will fully spread scientific, technical, and commercial knowledge without any need to re-create the social or cultural conditions that first produced it.
Stark concludes:
But if modernization still requires capitalism and freedom, what about Christianity? On the one hand, a strong case can be made that although Christianity was necessary for the rise of science, by now science has become so well institutionalized that it no longer requires a Christian warrant. The same may be true for belief in progress. The conviction that we can deeply penetrate nature’s secrets and achieve advanced technology may no longer need to be based on faith, since all one really needs to do now is look around.
On the other hand, if Christianity is now irrelevant to modernization, why is it still spreading so rapidly? The fact is that Christianity is becoming globalized far more rapidly than is democracy, capitalism or modernity. The religious revolution going on in Latin America is not merely Protestantization but Christianization—most new Latin Protestants not really ever having been Catholics. Africa is turning Christian so rapidly that there are far more Anglicans south of the Sahara than in Britain or North America, not to mention the tens of millions of new Baptists, Pentecostals, Roman Catholics and members of Protestant sects of local origin—about half of sub-Saharan Africans now are Christians. Even so, the Christianization of the Southern Hemisphere may be soon dwarfed by what is going on in China.
When the Communists took power in 1949, there were perhaps 2 million Christians in China. At the time, not only Marxists but even American liberal church leaders dismissed these as mainly “rice” Christians—people who put up with missionary efforts only in exchange for handouts. Fifty years later we have discovered that these Chinese rice Christians were so “insincere” that they endured decades of draconian repression, during which their numbers doubled again and again—there might be as many as 100 million Christians in China today! Moreover, conversion to Christianity is concentrated not among the peasants and the poor but among the best-educated, most modern Chinese.
There are many reasons people embrace Christianity, including its capacity to sustain a deeply emotional and existentially satisfying faith. But another significant factor is its appeal to reason and the fact that it is so inseparably linked to the rise of Western Civilization. For many non-Europeans, becoming a Christian is intrinsic to becoming modern. Thus it is quite plausible that Christianity remains an essential element in the globalization of modernity.
Without the numerous sacrifices Europeans made over a period of many centuries to defend their culture from the encroaching Muslim hordes, none of this would have been possible. Yet, at current birth and immigration rates, Muslims will soon have conquered the European continent without firing a shot, detonating a bomb or swinging a sword. They will have done it through immigration and reproduction while native Europeans, simultaneously and inexplicably, stopped having children. I do not mean to play the role of alarmist, but I find this at once terrifying and disheartening. For those who do not think so, I believe they fail to grasp the significance that Western Civilization, founded upon the bedrocks of Judeo-Christian principles and Greek philosophy, has had for mankind’s betterment.
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©2009 Matthew Cochrane
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