Year: 2008

  • Planet Narnia Author Michael Ward to Speak at Biola

    The Torrey Honors Institute of Biola University is honored to have Cambridge’s own Dr. Michael Ward speaking for us this Monday evening on his new piece of C.S. Lewis scholarship. Through medieval cosmology, Planet Narnia claims to provide the imaginative key to understanding the Chronicles of Narnia. This work is already launching Dr. Ward to…

  • Making Meaning in a Meaningless World: Five Ways that Won’t Work

    Trapped in a world that has no meaning? Wondering what to do with your time if there’s no point to it all? Eking out a futile existence on the shreds and shards of disappointment and despair? Well, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel (why add inefficiency to futility?) Here are the five most popular…

  • Was Job wrong?

    So began a session yesterday on the book of Job in the Torrey Honors Institute. The question, posed by myself and my colleague Matt Jenson, was intended to start a discussion on Job’s interactions with his friends, especially Elihu. It may seem like an odd, off the mark question given that Job was “blameless and…

  • The Bread of Forgiveness

    As a teacher and writer, I am constantly juggling, examining, ducking, burying, testing and launching words. Day and night, I read and talk and write. I seldom escape the weighing of my words for timing, accuracy and fit. I love this word-riddled life, this chance to mimic the One whose mere saying something makes it…

  • Modrn TheoLOLgians

    Fourth in a series. Click for Early Church, Medieval, and Reformation. Heres yr modrnz. Float yr mouse ovr teh jpgs 4 namez.

  • Christ Knows How to Be God (Austin Farrer)

    Jesus is God, but did he know during his earthly ministry that he was God? Was he, as a human, aware of his divinity? I think it is necessary, for biblical and logical reasons, to answer yes to this question, but I freely admit that doing so raises further difficult questions and forces us to…

  • God is Blessed

    We should pay more attention to the doctrine of divine blessedness. I have been pondering it lately, noticing it everywhere in older theological writing, and wondering how to give this great doctrine more weight and emphasis. Beatitude, blessedness, is a divine attribute. It is a perfection of God’s being. Blessedness has occupied an ambiguous place…

  • Charles “Freshly” Wesley

    Here’s a cartoon left on my office door by a Torrey student. Charles Wesley turned 300 this year. Who got the mad lyrical flow? I can’t hear you…

  • Every Day with God (Richard Rogers’ Seven Treatises)

    Richard Rogers (1550-1618) was a Puritan pastor who noticed that people had lots of questions about how to live the Christian life. They asked very detailed and specific questions, but none of the devotional books available in his time gave correspondingly detailed answers. There were a few Roman Catholic books that got down to specifics,…

  • The Argument from Consciousness

    Consciousness is among the most mystifying features of the cosmos. Geoffrey Madell opines that “the emergence of consciousness, then is a mystery, and one to which materialism signally fails to provide an answer.”[i] Naturalist Colin McGinn claims that its arrival borders on sheer magic because there seems to be no naturalistic explanation for it: “How…

  • The Lord’s Prayer in the Heidelberg Catechism

    Any good catechism includes the Lord’s Prayer, broken up line by line and explained. The Heidelberg Catechism includes such a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in its final ten questions (120-129), and it is excellent. Click through to read the full discussion in question and answer format. From that discussion, I culled the basic interpretation…

  • Worldview Anomalies, Recalcitrant Facts and the Image of God

    Once upon a time there was a man who thought he was dead. His wife tried everything she could to convince him he was very much alive. But try as she may, he would not change his mind. After several weeks of this, she finally took him to the doctor who assured the man he…