Centrality of the Gospel in the Life of the Believer

Posted by Phil Gons on Feb 18, 2010 in Books, Media, Movies & Videos, Theology | 0 comments

Tullian Tchividjian articulates beautifully one of the most transforming truths I’ve ever learned: the gospel is central in the daily life of the believer. It is well worth 2 minutes and 25 seconds of your time.

Tullian will be speaking on this subject at the upcoming Association of Biblical Counselors annual conference, whose theme is The Gospel Revolution: Re-Discovering the Power of the Cross.

I personally owe a great debt to Dr. Michael P. V. Barrett, who through his teaching, writing (esp. Beginning at Moses: A Guide to Finding Christ in the Old Testament and Complete in Him: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying the Gospel), and preaching was God’s instrument in opening my eyes to this crucial and scarcely known truth (at least in my experience), and to Faith Free Presbyterian Church for their gospel-centered preaching and worship.

HT: Dane Ortlund via Andy Naselli

OpenLibrary.org: “Every Book Ever Published”

Posted by Phil Gons on Apr 3, 2009 in Books, Technology, Websites | 4 comments

I knew that would get your attention.

Internet Archive, a site I use regularly for researching public domain books, just announced their newest project: OpenLibrary.org. Here’s the site’s description:

One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty, but achievable, goal.

To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.

To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.

According to the homepage, the current numbers are 22,845,290 book entries and 1,064,822 books with full text.

I’m impressed by the site, and I look forward to seeing how it does. The good news for Zotero users like me is that it does appear to have decent (though not perfect) Zotero support, allowing you to grab and import lots of books at a time.

Other online book sites you might find useful include:

Google Books
Amazon
Live Books (content still available at Archive.org)
Books.Logos.com (currently in beta and free)
CCEL
SeminaryLibrary.com (not free)
Dallas Theological Seminary Rare Books
Princeton Theological Seminary Digital Library
Scribd (I’m not very impressed. It has a poor selection and crashes Firefox 3.1 constantly!)
Project Gutenberg
Forgotten Books

Other helpful book sites that don’t have text available include:

What are your favorite sites for researching books?

Resources on the Doctrine of Union with Christ

Posted by Phil Gons on Mar 16, 2009 in Books, Theology | 4 comments

A pastor friend of mine sent out an email to a few friends last week asking for recommended resources on the doctrine of our union with Christ. I’ve done some reading and studying on the subject in the past, so I pulled together a bibliography of articles, books, etc.

I haven’t read everything on my list, but of the ones I’ve read, here are some of my top picks:

Michael P. V. Barrett, “Union with Christ: The Security of the Gospel,” in Complete in Him: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying the Gospel (Greenville, SC: Ambassador-Emerald, 2000), 93–118. [Amazon]
Bruce A. Demarest, “The Doctrine of Union with Christ,” in The Cross and Salvation: The Doctrine of Salvation, Foundations of Evangelical Theology, ed. John S. Feinberg (Wheaton: Crossway, 1997), 313–44. [Amazon | Google Books | Logos]
Wayne A. Grudem, “Union with Christ,” in Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 840–50. [Amazon | Google Books | Logos]
Michael Horton, “Union with Christ,” in Christ the Lord: The Reformation and Lordship Salvation, ed. Michael Horton (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), 107–15. [Amazon]
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Union with Christ,” in God the Holy Spirit, vol 2. of Great Doctrines of the Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 1997), 106–16. [Amazon | Logos]
John Murray, “Union with Christ,” in Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 161–73. [Amazon | Google Books]
Robert L. Reymond, “Union with Christ,” in A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Nelson, 1998), 736–39. [Amazon | Logos]

Go have a look at the new page, and feel free to add recommendations of resources that you’ve found helpful in the comments either on this post or on that page.

See also my review of Demarest’s The Cross and Salvation. I wrote it in seminary several years ago, but it may still be of some benefit. :)

A Case of Major Plagiarism

Posted by Phil Gons on Jan 10, 2009 in Books, Theology, Trinity | 9 comments

The weekend before Christmas I was doing some reading and research on the Trinity (which is what I spend most of my weekends doing), and I stumbled across something in a journal article that sounded very much like something I had read in a systematic theology book. So I opened the book to compare, and sure enough it was verbatim (the only difference being a single word missing the italics from the original source).

So I turned back to the article expecting to see that the author was quoting a large portion from the theology book and that I was simply reading somewhere in the middle of the quote, but I saw no quotation marks and no mention of the author’s work. Perplexed I started comparing further, wondering if perhaps this was just a very long extended quotation. To my shock I discovered the the author of the journal article had reproduced without quotation marks nearly verbatim (somewhere between 95% and 99% identical content) the entirety of his 24-page article from the other individual’s theology book—almost a complete copy and paste with just a handful of very minor cosmetic changes. The only credit he gave to the author of the content was a mention in his first footnote where he listed a few sources on the doctrine of the Trinity. At the end of the footnote, he mentioned his particular indebtedness to the author whose content he plagiarized. (Most readers have no idea how indebted he really was!)

I was completely baffled, and I struggled to try to figure out if there was a better explanation than the one that was staring me in the face. But I could not—and still cannot—begin to fathom how major plagiarism like this could have happened inadvertently. I came up with only two possible ways to explain what I had found.

Under pressure and in a time of weakness, the author of the article intentionally plagiarized content from the author of the theology book.
A teaching assistant wrote the article for the stated author, and he intentionally plagiarized content from the author of the theology book (perhaps without the knowledge of the stated author).

A few thoughts:

I realize that unintentional plagiarism happens quite frequently (I’ve come across numerous instances of it), but I thought that intentional plagiarism was the stuff of slacker high-school and college students, not pastors, professors, and published authors.
None of us is above sin—any kind of sin. When I ponder the sin of others, I try to call to mind the words of Jonathan Edwards, who in his 8th resolution said, “Resolved, to act, in all respects, both speaking and doing, as if nobody had been so vile as I, and as if I had committed the same sins, or had the same infirmities or failings as others; and that I will let the knowledge of their failings promote nothing but shame in myself, and prove only an occasion of my confessing my own sins and misery to God.”
Public sin, especially the kind that makes its way into print and digital resources and onto the internet, can have long-lasting consequences. “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Num 32:23), especially digital sins that allow readers to harness the power of Google and Libronix.

I debated whether or not I should blog about this, but I thought it could prove to be a means of grace to those of us who research and write—or who struggle with sin of any sort.

I just emailed the author and asked him in as kind a way as possible to help me make sense out of the similarities between his article and the section from the other author’s theology book. I hope that either (1) he has a good explanation that is escaping me or (2) he has long since repented and made his sin right with the Lord and the author. I pray that if he hasn’t already dealt with this, that God would grant him the grace to humble himself before God and man and repent.

I may or may not post an update if he responds.

Update: After a week or so, I hadn’t received a reply to my first email. So I emailed him again, letting him know that I would be calling him if I didn’t get a reply. He replied immediately and rather curtly informed me that, though he had an explanation, it was none of my business, and since it happened so long ago it should be treated as ancient history. I replied with a gentle explanation of why I felt biblically obligated to email him and told him that I’d been praying for him. I got a slightly kinder reply this time that said I’d caught him at a bad time and that he’d be back in touch sometime down the road. After the first reply from the individual, I also contacted the author who was apparently plagiarized to see if it had been dealt with on his end, but my email was the first he had heard about this. He is now evaluating what he should do.

Theo-Logic by Hans Urs von Balthasar for $27

Posted by Phil Gons on Jan 9, 2009 in Books, Deals, Theology | 0 comments

Ignatius Press is having a nice sale on a number of volumes. I just picked up Hans Urs von Balthasar’s three-volume Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory in hardback for just $27. That’s just a tad more than the cost of one of the volumes at Amazon.