Justin Taylor's Blog, page 309

Funnier Than Having a Roman Nose

Apparently there are 14 types of noses, and researchers can tell us what percentage of the population has each kind.

Which reminds me of G.K. Chesteron's quip: "Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose."

HT: Joe Carter

Women Lust, Too

Carolyn McCulley: "For years most churches herded the men off to talk about lust, while gathering the women to discuss modesty. While those are valid and much needed messages, they are incomplete for the culture in which we now live."

Betsy Hart: "Just as sexual pornography twists an understanding for men about real women's bodies and sexual appetites, so romantic pornography twists the perception for women about real men and how they 'ought' to behave toward women, which tends to amount to, well, behaving like a woman."

Click on their names to read each of their essays.

How Would You Summarize the New Testament in Three Words?

J. I. Packer:

Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that. (Knowing God, p. 214)

And a test for how well you understand Christianity:

You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator.

In the same way, you sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's holy Father.

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father.

If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. (Knowing God, p. 201; my emphasis)

The Gospel According to Zephaniah

Mike Bullmore's sermon from the Gospel Coalition Conference 2011 was an excellent model of careful, contextual, Christocentric preaching of the gospel from an Old Testament book:

The Gospel According to Zechariah

Mike Bullmore's sermon from the Gospel Coalition Conference 2011 was an excellent model of careful, contextual, Christocentric preaching of the gospel from an Old Testament book:

Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?

Alan Jacobs, writing in the Spring 2011 issue of The New Atlantis, has a lengthy essay on Marshall McLuhan. An excerpt:

I have been reading McLuhan off and on since, at age sixteen, I bought a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy. His centenary — McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 — provides an occasion for me to clarify my own oscillating responses to his work and his reputation. I have come to certain conclusions.

First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions.

Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable.

Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics.

Fourth, that McLuhan's determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed.

And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.

You can read the whole thing here.

HT: Joe Carter

10,000 Reasons

Matt Redman's latest album: 10,000 Reasons.

You can listen below to the title track:

Letter to an Unborn Baby

From a letter by Russell Moore to an unborn baby boy being adopted:

My prayer for you is that you see how fervently you are loved. Your birth-mother loved you, or you wouldn't be here to read this. Your parents love you, and always will, no matter what. Even more importantly, the God who formed you loves you enough to show you in your own life a picture of what he wants for all of us: to be adopted, for life, into his family.

I pray that one day, when you're old enough, you'll sense a kind of discontent with your life. I pray you'll see that this is not because of your circumstances, and it's certainly not because you were adopted. It's because you, like all of us, will be a sinner in need of mercy, a spiritual orphan in need of a Father. And I pray that you'll look to the story your parents believe. I pray you'll look to Jesus' bloody cross as hell enough for you, to Jesus' empty tomb as life enough for you. I pray you'll learn, if nothing else, to say two things: "Jesus is Lord" and "Abba, Father." I promise you, he will be there to receive you, to rejoice over you. He always is.

Again, I don't know you yet. But I look forward to meeting you one day, as your brother. If not in your next one to one hundred years of life, then in the trillions more we have before us in a new creation in Christ. I hope you'll be there with me with a bustling, uncountable number of ex-orphans like us. It's only then that you, and I, fully will know what it means to be adopted, adopted for life.

Read the whole thing here.

Mohler: 11 Books Every Pastor Should Read in 2011

Here is Albert Mohler's annual top 10 list. Since there weren't any links, I've reproduced the list below with links. It's alphabetized by author.

Collected Writings on Scripture by D.A. Carson (Crossway)
Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God by Paul Copan (Baker)
Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church by Kenda Creasy Dean (Oxford University Press)
The Doctrine of the Word of God by John Frame (P&R)
God's Glory in Salvation Through Judgment: A Biblical Theology by James M. Hamilton (Crossway)
To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by James Davison Hunter (Oxford University Press)
Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth by Alister McGrath (HarperOne)
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson)
The Letter to the Hebrews (Pillar New Testament Commentary) by Peter T. O'Brien (Eerdmans)
American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert Putnam and David Campbell (Simon & Schuster) [*Note: 60% off at Amazon at time of writing]
Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults by Christian Smith with Patricia Snell (Oxford University Press)

I Just Wanna Love On These Precious Kids and Come Alongside Them as We Do Life Together and Then Go Home to My Smokin' Hot Bride

Karen Swallow Prior rounds up and categorizes a number of the worst Christian-ese cliches.