Bible & Tech
The Ligonier Ministries Blog points out that R. C. Sproul was on the White Horse Inn with Michael Horton. The topic of discussion is the state of evangelicalism.
In this interview you’ll learn important things about R. C., like what kind of vegetable he would be if he were one.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZMOJGmMGj2E
Ryan Burns, an MDiv student at RTS Orlando and the main guy behind the Going to Seminary website, posts his 17-minute video interview with John Frame on issues related to seminary education. The interview goes into Frame’s views on the traditional model of seminary as expressed in these two pieces: “Learning at Jesus’ Feet: A Case for Seminary Training” and “Proposal for a New Seminary.”
Here are the questions that Frame answers:
At BibleTech:2008 James Tauber of MorphGNT.org gave the opening presentation in Room 1, “MorphGNT and the Building of Linguistic Databases for New Testament Greek,” during which he shared a little bit about his work on a graded Greek reader. Unfortunately, he ran out of time and had to rush through his material. The MP3 audio is available at the BibleTech Conference website. He discusses the graded reader at the tale end of his presentation (50:15–55:30).
He argues for a more inductive approach to learning Greek, and suggested that word frequency is not the best choice for the order in which students should learn new words. Students should first learn the words that occur together most frequently, allowing them to read a broader base of the Greek New Testament earlier on. He also suggests learning the inflected forms first, and then learning the lemmas and other deductive categories later.
The biblical text would be a combination of Greek and English words (following Greek word order) that would take into consideration the vocabulary that the students have learned. As they learn more, the English words would become Greek words. This approach allows students to dive in just about anywhere in the Greek New Testament without the clunkiness of multiple levels of text that you get with interlinears.
A friend notified me today about a “Christian” website where “Christians” illegally share a variety of forms of digital Christian content—from Christian music to Christian movies to Christian software. Scores of people, many of whom are in seminary training for pastoral ministry, post pirated Bible software on the web and invite others to download it, giving detailed instructions on how to unlock the software and bypass the security features. I’m blown away by how easily “Christians” can steal in order to enable them to have access to biblical resources.1 Something about that just doesn’t make sense. But that’s what sin does to us. It causes us to act in utterly irrational ways.
Take, for example, how one seminary student responds to another who shared stolen software with him: “God Bless You!” Another individual has this in his signature: “Live Hard, Play hard and let your life show WHO u live for.” Hmm. Another has a link to his website, “What Would Jesus Download,” in his signature. Good question indeed. Perhaps those downloading pirated software should ponder it a bit.
[Read more…] about “Christian” Piracy and the Blinding Effects of Sin
I don’t normally share things like this, but I found this video very intriguing.
One of my favorite lines was, “Am I going to do it, or am I not going to do it—period?” Hmm.
Read more:
I bought The Nativity Story for my parents for Christmas (along with Planet Earth and Blue Planet) and remembered that I had never posted about it here. Shanna and I watched it last spring when it first came out on DVD. It’s not fresh on my mind, so I can’t give a detailed review, but I do remember enough to know that I enjoyed it and would recommend it.
It was very faithful to the biblical accounts. While I wasn’t convinced that all of the ways they acted out the story were the best, those issues were minor and their interpretations were generally within the bounds of viable options. I was initially disappointed with how abruptly the movie came to an end, but then I remembered that it was a movie about Jesus’ birth, not His life. Though The Nativity Story isn’t my favorite biblical movie, it is one that I would recommend and will probably watch again.
Other Reviews:
Michael O. Sajbel, dir. One Night with the King. 20th Century Fox, 2006. 124 min. PG
[rate 1.5]
Shanna and I watched One Night with the King last night and were incredibly (!) disappointed. We had just finished reading Esther in our Bible reading, so the story was fresh on our minds. We were expecting the movie to tell faithfully the story of Esther. Not so. Probably only 25% of the movie corresponds to the biblical account. I’m not talking about just filling in the details. I’m talking about totally scrapping the biblical story, picking up a handful of those scraps, and then putting them back together in such a way that they are virtually unrecognizable. Well, maybe that’s a little overstatement, but you get my point. Over and over throughout the movie, we’d stop and say, “What?! That’s not how that happened! Why did they change that?” Not quite The Gospel of John! (More like The Ten Commandments.) It wasn’t until the end that we learned that the movie wasn’t supposed to be retelling the biblical story of Esther but the fictional story of the novel Hadassah: One Night with the King. (I vaguely remember reading that, but had forgotten.) Knowing that up front would probably have helped significantly.
Shanna and I got another call from the local movie store inviting us to come in for a free rental. We took them up on it and got The Ten Commandments. It was just shy of three hours long, which, in this case, was not a good thing! It stood in stark contrast to the commitment to following the biblical story that The Gospel of John evidenced. I’m not opposed to filling in some of the details to make the story flow. Nor am I totally opposed to omitting some of the story to make it a reasonable length. However, I am opposed to making up all sorts of ridiculous things and adding them in addition to or in place of the biblical account! I did benefit from the few portions that were an accurate recounting of the Exodus record. Seeing the events visualized brings them to life. I’ll read Exodus in a new way next time. This benefit notwithstanding, The Ten Commandments (2006) was incredibly poor. Don’t waste your three hours.