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Category: Christian Culture

  • Responding to a Video Trailer the Right Way

    UPDATE: Someone took my idea (although I’m sure they didn’t get it directly from me) and made a potential script for a parody video. All of sudden, everyone is talking about hell. Or eternal punishment. Or universalism. Or God’s wrath. One way or another, it has seemed like everyone is in implicit conversation with the…

  • Casting Call for the Next Jesus Movie

    Suppose you were in charge of casting for a new version of the Jesus movie. But this time, instead of actors, you have to pick prominent Christian pastors. They don’t have to all be in the same sub movement, so for instance you could mix evangelical with emergent if you want to, but given those…

  • False Teaching vs False Teachers

    As sort of a continuation of Monday’s post, I thought I’d offer just a couple of thoughts on the distinction between heresy and a false teaching, as well as heresy and heretic. Technically speaking, one who is a pastor of a non-denominational church can’t really be a heretic, since the standard is going against the…

  • Love May Win, But So Does An Effective Marketing Campaign

    Since it was a Saturday, presumably the meetings weren’t too much of a problem (image via). I would have been interested to see how things panned out on a weekday. Let’s consider the flow of events: Friday: This video, made by HarperCollins to promote an upcoming book is released to relatively little fanfare Saturday @1145:…

  • Determining Your Reformed Quotient

    In their Younger, Restlesser, Reformeder, Ted Kluck and Zach Bartels offer the necessary equation to figuring out your true Reformed street cred, or as they call it, your Reformed Quotient. Hopefully you can tell from the cover on the right this a work of satire, but just in case, this is very short little book…

  • Histories and Fallacies

    As mentioned yesterday, I thought Carl Trueman’s Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History deserves a bit of a fuller review. It’s a pretty easy read, and I had been waiting for some time for it to be available in the library. Anyone interested in history ought to read it, mainly because…

  • Genetic Fallacies in Actions

    In his newest book Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, Carl Trueman presents two versions of the genetic fallacy in action. Interestingly, they both are used by Christians to support their view of our nation, but perhaps not surprisingly, for different ends. In case you’re a bit rusty on what the…

  • A Brief Note on Criticism

    I thought after the last post I offered on Horton’s The Christian Faith, it might be helpful to clarify a few things. While at times I may be critical of Horton’s work, it is nonetheless an admirable achievement. Not everyone can write a systematic theology, much less do so while still relatively young. Part of…

  • The Price of Contextualization

    Something occurred to me the other day about contextualization. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s just a fancy way of talking about how you culturally frame the message of either the gospel, or theology in general, in order to make it more easily understood to a particular audience. The concept (or the articulation…

  • 10 Good Non-theological Books I Read In 2010

    As a kind of companion post to the last one, here are the best non-theology books I read this past year. In a way though, they are not without theological implications (one of which I discussed here). Particularly interesting in this regard are the books by Klosterman, which involve some very penetrating analyses of culture…