The audio for the 2007 Westminster Theological Seminary Preaching Conference has just been posted.

• An Exposition of a Biblical Narrative
  Dr. Dan Doriani
  Tuesday, October 23, 7:30 PM
• The Theory and Practice of Preaching Biblical Narrative
  Dr. Dan Doriani
  Wednesday, October 24, 9:00 AM
• The Preacher’s Story and the Quest for Godliness
  Dr. Dan Doriani
  Wednesday, October 24, 10:30 AM
• Princeton Portrait - Archibald Alexander
  Dr. James Garretson
  Wednesday, October 24, 3:30 PM
• What Do You Preach The Day After the King Is Executed?
  Dr. Carl Trueman
  Wednesday, October 24, 2:00 PM
• Narrative Preaching
  Dr. Tuck Bartholomew
  Wednesday, October 24, 2:00 PM
• Beyond the Sacred Page: When The Story Doesn’t Quite Say What You Wish
  Dr. Dan Doriani
  Wednesday, October 24, 10:30 AM
• They also point to Dr. Doriani’s Putting the Truth to Work: The Theory and Practice of Biblical Application.

From Goodbye Blog by Alan Jacobs:

[T]he blogosphere inevitably accelerates the pace of debate to the timetable of daily journalism. In terms of how they treat substantive ideas, blogs are not very different from newspapers: they present an idea and then move on, as quickly as possible, to the next idea. Perhaps there can be, later on, some brief acknowledgment that that idea wasn’t treated fully and adequately—but, as the newsreel in Citizen Kane reminds us, Time is On The March, and bloggers are under enormous pressure to march along with it. […] Blogs remain great for news: political, technological, artistic, whatever. And they provide a very rich environment in which news (or rather “news”) can be tested and evaluated and revised, as we have seen repeatedly, from cnn’s firing of Eason Jordan to the discrediting of Dan Rather’s story on President Bush’s National Guard service. But as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency—or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture. […] On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.

Charles Bridges in The Christian Ministry writes:

Nor let it be thought, that studious habits must necessarily infringe upon our more active employments. What shall we say to the nine pondrous folios of Augustine, and the thirteen of Chrysostom - volumes not written, like Jerome’s, in monastic retirement, but in the midst of almost daily preaching engagements, and conflicting, anxious, and most responsible duties - volumes - not of light reading, the rapid flow of shallow declamation - but the results of deep and well-digested thinking? The folios also of Calvin - the most diligent preacher, and of Baxter, the most laborious pastor of his day - full of though and matter, bear the same testimony to the entire consistency of industrious study with devoted Ministerial diligence. The secret of this efficiency seem to have much consisted in a deep sense of the value of that most precious of all talents - time; and of an economical distribution of its minutest particles for specific purposes. Mr. Alleine would often say, “Give me a Christian, that counts his time more precious than gold.” […] But here we should be, like the miser with his money - saving it with care, and spending it with caution. […] And since goldsmiths and refiners’ [Boyle] remarks - “are wont all the year long to save the very sweepings of their shops, because they may contain in them some filings or dust of those richer metals, gold and silver; I see not, why a Christian may not be as careful, not to lose the fragments and lesser intervals of a thing incomparably more precious than any metal - time; especially when the improvement of them by our meletetics may not only redeem so many portions of our life, but turn them to pious uses, and particularly to the great advantage of devotion.”

[M]y prayer is that now more than ever, those who stand behind the sacred desk would recover the vanishing art of expository preaching. The church is always looking for better methods in order to reach the world. But God is looking for better men who will devote themselves to His biblically mandated method for advancing His kingdom, namely, preaching - and not just any kind of preaching, but expository preaching.

This being so, nothing could be more relevant for preachers in this hour - a time when fads and gimmicks seem to be hypnotizing church leaders - than to revisit the pulpit power of the Genevan Reformer. May a new generation of expositors arise to embrace his core distinctives in their preaching ministries.

Steven J. Lawson, The Expository Genius of John Calvin, pp. 18-19 (emphasis original).

In his biography of Edwards, George Marsden pointed out something that surprised me a bit.

During his stay in New York he began making entries in his notebooks on the mysterious revelations of the last book of the Bible as a framework for understanding current events. This subject soon became a lifetime preoccupation. […] “If I heard the least hint of any thing that happened in any part of the world, that appeared to me, in some respect or other, to have a favorable aspect on the interest of Christ’s kingdom, my soul eagerly catched at it; and it would much animate and refresh me. I used to be earnest to read public news-letters, mainly for that end; to see if I could not find some news favorable to the interest of religion in the world.”¹

1. Marsden, George. Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 48.↩

Reformed Theological Seminary has posted a number of courses in iTunes’ new iTunes U service. You can find out more at Reformed’s site.

HT: Tim Challies via Jacob Hantla

David Wells has an insightful book Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World. The book deals with hyperconsumerism and functional nihilism among other things and is well worth the read. In a chapter entitled Miracles of Modern Splendor, Wells sets forth an interesting proposition:

Years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that we are “somewhat embarrassed by the fact that we are the first culture which is in danger of being subordinated to its economy. We have to live as luxuriously as possible in order to keep our productive enterprise from stalling.” Today, we are not embarrassed at all. It is exactly what we want and what, we have come to think, we need. This kind of avid consumerism, Christopher Lasch observes, “promotes an ethic of hedonism… and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial.” This never-ending transformation of luxuries into necessities, the experience of comfort only fueling the desire for even more comfort, “appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events,” he remarks, “not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century.”¹

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1. Wells, David F., Above All Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 41.↩

In his book God is the Gospel John Piper makes the point that Christians can tend to miss the main point of the gospel by focusing on its peripheral aspects instead of its supreme end - the glory of Christ. Imagine a jeweler who is an expert in diamonds. It is certainly possible for a jeweler to become so enamored with the peripheral aspects of a diamond and yet miss the diamond’s overall glory. The jeweler can appreciate the diamond’s cut, its magnificent clarity, and its color all the while forgetting to see that those aspects contribute to the overall glory of the object. If the jeweler appreciates each characteristic in isolation without being able to appreciate the fact that the diamond in its fullness is a wonderful thing as it shines in the light, he has missed the point. However, when understood rightly, each individual characteristic of the diamond contributes to its overall glory. As the jeweler comes to understand each aspect of the diamond more fully, his appreciation of the diamond’s glory in its fullness is that much more magnified.
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We had a serious issue with our web hosting company that kept us down for a week. We have since severed our ties with that company and are now running on a new host. We apologize for those who have been trying to visit the site in the last few days.

We’re still working to bring the main site back up. It will be back soon.

After taking a look at Mark Dever’s reading plan I decided to attempt to develop my own. Before beginning my MDiv work at Westminster, PA I spent a few years reading through Westminster’s recommended reading list. It was extremely beneficial to have a list of excellent books laid out for me in order to direct my learning. I believe a methodical reading plan is something all types of people can benefit from.
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