On Distorting the Love of God — D.A. Carson

“If people believe in god at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this “god,” however he, she, or it may be understood, is a loving being. But that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in “the love of God” is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about “the love of God” they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. Worse, neither side may perceive that this is the case… to put this another way, in present-day Western culture many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, the personhood of God, to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.” (http://www.dts.edu/media/play/on-distorting-the-love-of-god-d-a-carson/.)

 

 

What Are You Working on Now?

Sometimes I have friends or colleagues ask me, “What are you working on now?”  It’s a great question — one that assumes I’m trying to stay active and productive for the Kingdom.  And I really do want my life to count for the Lord.  For those interested, here are several projects that are keeping me out of trouble!

“Iron Sharpens Iron” Conference 2013

1.  I have the great privilege again this year of participating in Emmaus Bible College’s “Iron Sharpens Iron” conference.  The theme of the conference this year is “Defending the Gospel” and our plenary speaker is D.A. Carson.  You can learn about the conference here.  The workshops that I am doing are entitled “Abandon All Hope: Let’s Stop Being Embarrassed about Hell!”, “Made for another World: The Gospel and the Loss of Transcendence”, “None Dare Call it Heresy: Substitute Gospels and Their Evangelists,” “Whose Job is it? Defending the Gospel in a Postmodern, Truth-Decayed Culture” and descriptions can be found here.

2.  I have had a contract for a book entitled something like Twelve Atheists Who Have Trusted Christ for a while — and I really need to make some progress on that project!  My plan is to interview a wide variety of people who would describe themselves as former, serious atheists who came to believe the Good News about Jesus and moved from death to life!  Know anyone I should interview?

3.  This summer I have several workbooks I want to complete.  I’ll be teaching my course “Eternal Destinies” in the Fall semester, so I want to produce something that would help my students understand and respond to the views of heaven and hell held by several world religions (Islam, Judaism, Buddhist, Hinduism) and a variety of cults (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Unitarian Universalists, etc.).  We will also look at some of the so-called “Evangelical” re-tooling of the doctrine of eternal lostness (such as Sharon Baker’s Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment and Rob Bell’s Love Wins).

4.  One of the great privileges of my teaching career has been that of co-teaching a course entitled “The Integration of Theology and Psychology” with Dr. Allan  McKechnie.  We’re both going to be developing a workbook for the Fall offering of this course.  The ten areas of systematic theology (technically known as Prolegomena, Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Anthropology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Pneumatology, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology) provide the outline for the course.  The great thing about this course is that I get all the free counseling that I want — but it is from counseling students!

5.  My first novel, entitled Abandon All Hope: A Novel about Lostness, will be available in a couple of weeks.  This is new territory for me, but I believe I’ve produced a good story.  It’ll be less than 50 pages long and I will be selling copies for $5 + postage to any who would like to read some “theological fiction”!  Let me know if you’re interested.

What are some projects that you are working on?