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On Dec 3, 2011 the Evangelical Theological Faculty (Leuven) organized a day of conferences on Mission and Evangelism. I was asked to do a conference on the topic “Should We Talk Less About Evangelism?” Each of the four speakers had fifty minutes. A small interaction time was scheduled at the end. This was a nice opportunity and setting for me to continue testing my work on evangelism for the book in English I am hoping to finish in 2012. Then, hopefully, a publisher will pick it up.

John G. Turner. Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Working with students and on the historical and theological foundations of the contemporary discourse on evangelism, I try to read what’s available and good on these issues. After having read Meeting Jesus at University, I decided to read this book on Campus Crusade (recently renamed CRU, see also Campus Crusade International). Though the book dates back to 2008, I only discovered it recently.

John Stott passed away on July 27, 2011. He was born in 1921. More information on the memorial page on the John Stott.org site.

As I have said before, I have not offered to present papers at conferences the last few years (bad career move!). I am breaking this habit. Since I will be at the Tyndale Fellowship NT study group this coming July and since there was a free spot, I volunteered to step in. My paper will be “The Great Commission (Matt. 28.19–20) in History and Today or Why the Great Commission is not the Duty of All Believers.”

Stefan Kottwitz, L^aT_eX: Beginner’s Guide. Packt Publishing, 2011.

If you have looked around this site, you know that one of the tools I use to write is L^aT_eX. Though it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, it does look like it is becoming more and more popular in the humanities. A sign of this increasing popularity is this new book published by Pack Publishing.

I have mentioned in another post that Calvin already refers to the discussion of the works of the law in reference to ceremonials. Calvin refers back to Chrystostome, Origen, and Jerome. I had also mentioned Ambrosiaster’s reference to works of the law as sabbaths, circumcision, etc. Here are the references in his Romans commentary where Ambrosiaster brings this up from the English translation in the Ancien Christian Texts Series (Ambrosiaster. Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians. Ancient Christian Texts. Edited by Thomas C. Oden and Gerald L. Bray. Translated by Gerald L. Bray. IVP Academic, 2009.)

Four years after the publication of my dissertation, it has finally been reviewed on the Review of Biblical Literature site. The review is by Paul Sanders of the Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, in Utrecht (Netherlands).

One frustrating thing with a review coming out so long after your publication (most of my revised dissertation was finished in the fall of 2006) is that it drags you back to a bygone stage of your research. Hopefully you have progressed since then.

There has been a lot of debate about the role of the Church and of the local churches in evangelism recently. Should evangelism be the priority, the main focus of the Church’s life and services? Answering these questions will of course depend on how we define “evangelism.”

It is a well known feature of the New Testament that it really does not say much about the responsibility of the local church in evangelism.

The big ticket at the ETS 2010 was the sessions by Tom Schreiner, Frank Thielman, and N. T. Wright on the issue of Justification by faith, mostly actually on Wright’s vision of it. Originally, John Piper was to come but cancelled due to a sabbatical. Schreiner accepted to take his place. Since Wright’s Justification book is a response to Piper’s book about Wright position, Piper’s presence would have been interesting. Nevertheless, his absence may have been a good thing since the whole thing might have centered too much on Wright-Piper with Thelma as a outsider/spectator. Plus, it might have become too personal, kind of a Luther-Calvin (the two figures Wright often pits against each other) debate with Zwingli (or Bucer, or whoever Thielman feels comfortable being associated with) counting the points, you just never know.

I returned yesterday from ten days spent in Atlanta to attend the Evangelical Theological Society and the Society of Biblical Literature yearly meetings. I am not a member of the ETS anymore, but since I could stay in Atlanta with my in-laws, I decided to attend to see some friends and go to some sessions. Given time and financial constraints, I don’t attend these meetings every year. Last one was in Boston in 2008. Some thoughts on the 2010 editions.