I just finished reading Peter Leithart’s article “Keep the Fast, Keep the Feast,†posted at First Things. This is quite an amazing piece of work. Leithart has some helpful points reflecting on both church history and Scriptures, and he provides some great examples of how to do biblical-theological interpretation. Leithart blogs here, and he pointed out that the article is already translated into German! Take a moment and read the whole thing (in English, of course!).
Also, read the following excerpt from the article at least:
Jesus is the Last Adam because He keeps the fast. He enters a world that is no longer a garden, but a howling waste, and in that wilderness Satan tempts Him to break the fast, to be an Adam: “You’re hungry; eat this now. You deserve the accolades of the crowds; you can have it now if you jump off the temple. You want all authority in heaven and on earth, but your Father won’t give that to you unless you suffer an excruciating, shameful death; you can have it all now, no cross or self-denial required. It’s yours, and you only need to do a bit of bowing. Life, glory, power, everything you want, everything you deserve—you can have it all now.â€
Jesus refused, and refused, and then refused again, and in so doing broke the power of Adamic sin. Jesus kept the fast; he waited, labored, suffered, died, and then opened his hand to receive all the life, glory, honor, authority, and dominion that his Father had to give Him. He kept the fast and as a result was admitted to the fullness of the kingdom’s feast—because by that time both it and he were ready. And by resisting the devil, Jesus sets the pattern of true fasting and reveals a Lenten way of life.
In honor of the great missionary and pastor, commonly known as “St. Patrick”, I would like to encourage you all to take a moment sometime today and read about his life. Below are a few articles to choose from, but I highly recommend the one by Mark Driscoll called Vintage Saints: Saint Patrick. Here is an excerpt from that article:
Technically, Saint Patrick is not even a saint, as he was never canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Additionally, Patrick was not even Irish. Rather, he was an Englishman who was a Roman citizen that spoke Latin and a bit of Welsh.
Patrick was born around 390 A.D. When he was roughly 16 years of age he was captured by pirates and taken to Ireland on a ship where he was sold into slavery. He spent the next six years alone in the wilderness as a shepherd for his masters’ cattle and sheep. [Continue Reading…]
Dinesh D’Souza was interviewed by Marcia Segelstein for our Salvo Magazine in “The Apologist.” An excerpt::
Segelstein: How has Islamic terrorism played into this new “missionary atheism”?
D’Souza: Quite simply, it is what has given atheists the confidence to market their claims. For a long time now, atheists have been accusing religion of being ignorant—of being unscientific and preferring blind faith over critical reason—but that could have been attributed to just harmless error. Atheists can now argue, however, that religious people are not merely ignorant; they’re also dangerous. Religion is not merely irrational; it’s also toxic. It sets man against man. It produces carnage. It causes people to fly planes into buildings after reading holy books. Atheists have been able to surf on the wave of 9/11 by generalizing the crimes committed in the name of Islam to crimes committed in the name of God. This has given modern atheism a certain sort of relevance, currency, and confidence.
The interview is worth your time. D’Souza lets Hitchens, Dawkins, and others get away with precious little. Hitchens, he notes, is not an atheist, but an “anti-theist.”
John Dickson of the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) interviewed my friend and mentor, Donald Hagner, on various issues related to New Testament history. The interview has been chopped up into smaller bits each around 4 to 8 minutes long.
The interviewer was well prepared and asked excellent questions. He interacted with Don’s areas of expertise (the rabbinic model of oral tradition, the Gospel of Matthew, the apostolic fathers) and proposed questions that gave him an opportunity to answer common skeptical objections to the historicity of Jesus and the Gospels.
It will be evident, as you watch the interview, that Don does not subscribe to a doctrine of inerrancy such as that enshrined in the Chicago Statement. And yet he adopts a believing posture toward the New Testament as historically reliable and apostolic in origin.
I usually have this thing in an argument — when one side invokes the epithet “Nazi”, I recognize things have gone from reasonable or rational to absurd.
In that context, I present the following, HT: Abraham Piper & Andrew Jones.
