IVP - Addenda & Errata - May 2009 Archives

The Lost World of Genesis One (Part Two)

Over the years I’ve learned that John Walton has some very important things to say about Genesis 1. A few years back I suggested to my colleagues that we should ask John to write a straightforward and readable book that would put his work on the table for anyone involved in the “origins” debates. They agreed. I asked John. He agreed. Now we have that book.

The Lost World of Genesis One (Part One)

Several weeks ago, In his Christianity Today review of Davis Young and Ralph Stearley’s The Bible, Rocks and Time, Marcus R. Ross of Liberty University was not satisfied with the authors’ handling of the six days of Genesis 1. Young and Stearley are critical of various views favored by young earth creationists (YECs), but in Ross’s view, they do not make a “positive case” for their favored “framework hypothesis.” Ross maintains that the YEC view is not built on simply one chapter of Scripture, Genesis 1, and that while Young and Stearley have given YECs much to think about, in their focusing on only the first chapter of Genesis, they have not gone far enough.

When the Missionary Gets Out of the Way

Seventy-two years ago, on May 12, 1937, James R. Graham Sr., a Southern Presbyterian missionary in Tsingkiangpu, China, wrote home to supporting churches. This was in the forty-seventh year of Sophie and James Graham’s missionary service in Tsingkiangpu:

We have a very large country work, extending over all of three counties and over parts of two other counties. The country work from this station was, for years, exceedingly slow. The prejudice against us was great and it took many years to live it down. This has always been a great official center and wherever the official influence predominated in the old days, their influence was always thrown against allowing the foreigners to get any foothold anywhere. They didn’t love us and felt that we would be a source of trouble to them, I suppose. It is quite different now. The Church, which grew up here in the city, has long ago become self-supporting and self-governing. We have no hand in it at all, except to lend it every help and support that we can in the way of advice and moral assistance.

Whatever Happened to Profound Unbelief?

Recently I referred to (and quoted from) David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. I can’t resist returning to a few pages in the penultimate chapter of that book. One of Hart’s chief contentions is that they just don’t make atheists like they used to. Nietzsche was a worthy opponent who truly understood the issues at stake. But the latest tribe—led by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris—are an embarrassment to their intellectual tradition. Hart’s book is full of solid historical correction vigorously argued. But he also knows how to make his opponents look absolutely silly.

Any Lessons from History?

A prominent evangelical theologian and apologist at a prominent evangelical seminary published a book with a prominent evangelical press proposing that abortion is ethically acceptable in certain cases, such as “mongolism,” or Down Syndrome. Among other things, he says “Artificial abortion … results in the taking of a potential [emphasis his] human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human—it is an undeveloped person… . If a life must be stopped, it is obviously better to stop it before it ever really gets started.” I am not making this up.