Extracurricular Activities 8.15.14 — Cultural Disintegration, Mike Bird's Inerrancy, and Septuagint Explained

Tim Gombis Reflects on Salvation as Gift and Obligation

Many Christians have trouble with the paradox in Paul whereby salvation is both a gift and involves obligations. Salvation as divine gift makes sense, but the demand for human response raises the specter of “works righteousness”...

I suspect that this is an ongoing theological problem because of the conceptual frames in which we wrestle with the tension between divine and human action (e.g., human action must in some way marginalize divine action).

Larry Hurtado Explains The Septuagint and Shares Some Scholarly Resources

In response to an earlier posting, a couple of commenters referred to the “Septuagint” (the name commonly given to the Greek translations of the Jewish scriptures, the “Old Testament”), raising questions about what it represented in its original setting.  There were also questions about how the divine name was handled.  I’ll mention here a few points about the topic and offer a few suggestions for those who would like to know more.

Scot McKnight Engages with Michael Bird's View of Inerrancy

America exports its goods giving it a worldwide influence, including its sports — basketball and (American) football and baseball. Of course baseball is played elsewhere, and baseball in the Dominican is special, but these are American-shaped sports. But would a Dominican say baseball is an American sport? (Not on your life.)

Is inerrancy a game American evangelicals play? Mike Bird, in his essay “Inerrancy is not necessary for evangelicalism outside the USA” in the book Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, thinks so.

Peter Enns on Evangelicals, Evolution, the Bible and Facts

A recent article in the NYT talks about the collision between “beliefs and facts.” It struck a chord...

Applying this to the question of Christianity and evolution, it’s not enough to “show people the facts” of the fossil record or genetics, even if in doing so some change of thinking results.

If anyone wants to re-educate evangelicalism about evolution, they need to do more than “re-educate” evangelicals–it takes more than slides and YouTube videos explaining the compelling evidence.

Joseph Rigney on Cultural Disintegration and the Revival of a Moral Imagination

We live in a time of cultural disintegration. Not just America, but the entire Western world is jettisoning the wisdom of the ages and striving to remake the world after our own image. And, unsurprisingly, the fundamental arena in which this cultural unraveling is playing out is that of sexuality...apart from a revival of a moral (and specifically biblical) imagination, political efforts can only be a part of a slow retreat. Laws and policies play a crucial role in shaping culture (for good and for ill), but they are insufficient for preserving and promoting the godliness and health of society. For that, the imagination must be converted.

Such a conversion and revival of the moral imagination must begin with the church of Jesus Christ. As Peter reminds us, judgment always begins at the household of God. So what would such a revival of a robustly Christian moral imagination look like?

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