Entries Tagged 'Scholarship' ↓

A few weeks ago I posted an article highlighting something I found in the book The Scotch-Irish: A Social History by James G. Leyburn. Today I want to post an extended quotation from the book and make a few observations.

I am in the section of the book that deals with Scotch-Irish immigration to America. The chapter is “The Presbyterian Church”. The first point made is about the lack of churches among many (most) of these immigrants. Two reasons are cited: First, the lack of trained ministers. The Presbyterians insisted on a classical education for their clergy, something in short supply on the frontier. Trained ministers from the Old Country were rarely found among the immigrants.

But an even greater problem afflicted the re-establishment of the church among these immigrants, all of them Presbyterian in their native country. That problem was a general spiritual malaise that affected all the major denominations at the time, according to Leyburn. My lengthy quotation follows (including the quote in our little ‘identify’ the person and time game a few days ago). The quotation comes from pp. 277-279.

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Ran across this in my reading:

“Conservatives were contemptuous of [his] pulpit pyrotechnics, dubious of the validity of the sudden conversions he achieved, and sure that the church would degrade itself by diluting its message and making religion ‘easy’ for the common man.”

So… who is the preacher I mask by ‘[his]’ and when is the historical setting?

No Googling!

I have been playing with Logos 4 for about five days now. I was fully prepared to disdain L4 as much as I do L3 and previous versions. Well…

Well blow me down, I actually like Logos 4. They said they rebuilt it from the ground up. They did! And it shows!

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One of the books I read this spring is Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman by John R. Muether. My son gave me this book about a year or more ago and I decided it was high time I read it. This is the first biography of Van Til that I have read. A friend who also read it said that it was a good book to fill in some background that other books missed. He recommended reading some of the other books in addition to this one.

While I will put this post in the ‘book reviews’ category, this article isn’t really a book review. I do recommend this book and think it will be worth your while to read if you are interested in Van Til at all.

One of the things that I learned from this book is that Van Til was definitely a separatist. But he wasn’t your fundamentalist type of separatist. He had his own branch of separatism, making himself distinct from both evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

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Some good thoughts on preaching by Dave over here. It reminds me of a book I am reading.

It is called The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, by James G. Leyburn. I picked up during a recent vacation in Tennessee at one of the state’s excellent historical sites. (To my chagrin, I see I could have gotten it on Amazon for $6 less.)

I am a sucker for historical sites and for historical books that you find there. My kids make fun of me… (this time, one of my sons said, “Oh boy, get ready for more Civil War illustrations!”)

This particular book traces the American immigrants who became known in America as the Scotch-Irish from their time in Scotland to their first emigration to Ireland (Ulster) and from there to America. I am just finishing the description of life in Scotland prior to the great exodus.

The story is fascinating (OK, so I’m a nerd). Leyburn was a prominent sociology professor at Washington & Lee University. Their library is named after him. I don’t know if he professed to be a Christian or not, but the book seems to be written from a secular perspective. That’s what makes it’s comments on preaching and the Scottish Reformation so interesting.

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A very interesting discussion on names and terminology in the 17th century is going on here. Would the first Baptists have embraced the term ‘anabaptist’? Apparently not.

Apparently labels matter (or mattered) to some.

I just got an e-mail notification of a resource put out by Zondervan, the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament. It looks like a fascinating source of information.

Readers should note that such publications often support liberal views on Biblical dates and tend to minimize the miraculous. Nevertheless, if read with discernment, such resources can provide valuable background material for studying and teaching the Bible.

A sample is offered where you can read the Ezra-Nehemiah section and see what is offered in this set.

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Matthew Henry’s final sentence on Ps 81.16:

He delights in our serving him, not because he is the better for it, but because we shall be.

Huh… so he doesn’t delight in himself for his own glory? Who’d a thunk it?

Will Medicine Stop the Pain?, by Elyse Fitzpatrick and Laura Hendrickson, Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2006.

This book, subtitled Finding God’s healing for depression, anxiety, & other troubling emotions, is written by two women who are certified by NANC, the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors. This is the organization whose philosophy and literature we tend to recommend and attempt to follow in the area of counseling. It is opposed to integrating secular psychology with the Bible in counseling.

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25 Surprising Marriages, by William J. Petersen, Timothy Press, 1997, 2006 rpt.

This book, subtitled How Great Christians Struggled to Make Their Marriages Work, is one that my brother describes as being helpful for its cumulative effect rather than any one of the particular biographies it sketches for you.

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