Midweek Roundup - 9/24/14

Each Wednesday we share some recent links that we found informative, insightful, or helpful. These are often related to Crossway books, Bibles, or authors—but not always. We hope this list is an interesting and encouraging break for the middle of your week.

1. Jonathan Dodson on 2 big reasons evangelism isn't working

One in five Americans don’t believe in a deity. Less than half of the population attends religious services on a regular basis.

People simply find our evangelism unbelievable.

Why?

While a person’s response to Christ is ultimately a matter that rests in God’s sovereign hands — something we have no control over — a person’s hearing of the gospel is a matter we do have control over and responsibility for.

2. Vern Poythress on the real problem with gambling

Gamblers who hope to beat the odds do not really accept the God of the Bible. He does not match their desires for the way that they want the world to be and what they hope the world will be, for the sake of achieving prosperity in their lives. Their desires are twisted, as are the desires of all sinful people. Gamblers may look foolish to those of us who see through the foolishness of gambling. But we all fall captive, each in our own way, to substitutes and idols of one kind or another, because desire resides within us to make ourselves gods. Gamblers just have one particular form of the desire, where their desire to be rich and to boast in their luck is a desire that makes them serve false gods. They serve the god of self. At the same time they make Lady Luck into a goddess to serve, in order to serve the deeper god of self.

3. Jen Wilkin on why the church needs men and women to be friends

Part of the problem with asking the question, “Can men and women be friends?” is nailing down which men and which women (married? single?) and what kind of friendship is in view. The question often leads us to assume intimate friendship is what is being suggested – hanging out alone together, sharing your deepest hopes and fears. And no, that’s not a good idea. If you’re single it leads to a lot of weirdness about where the relationship is headed, and if you’re married, you should reserve intimate friendship for your spouse. But we need not rule out male-female friendship built on mutual respect and affinity, cultivated within appropriate boundaries. If we do, we set a course charted by fear rather than by trust.

4. Tim Keller on making sense of the stories we tell

In his new book, The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth, Mike Cosper, like Babbage two generations ago, turns to the main storytellers of our time—but in the case of late modern culture, they are more often filmmakers than writers. Mike also rightly assumes that human beings cannot escape being in the image of God. He quotes postmodern writer David Foster Wallace saying, “We’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something.” Indeed we are, and in the cinema of our time, we also see the filmmakers bearing witness to the inveteracy of evil, the impotence of human nature, the need for pardon and love—and redemption.

5. Fred Sanders on the strange legacy of Wolfhart Pannenberg

On September 5, an important voice in academic theology was lost. Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the most significant theologians of the 20th century, died peacefully at 85 at his home near Munich, Germany.

Born 1928 in Stettin, Germany, Pannenberg was raised as an atheist under the Nazi regime, more fluent in modern criticisms of Christianity than in Christian doctrine itself. “I was nourished on Nietzsche’s philosophy,” he said.