1. An Adamic background to Philippians 2:5-11. I’ve been powering through Beale’s A New Testament Biblical Theology in the past week. In Part 4, he explores sin as idolatory, especially in relation to the image of God - and the end-time restoration of God’s image in humanity, firstly in Christ, then in those who identify with him. In Chapter 14, he explores how Paul explores passages that support this notion, including Philippians 2:5-11....

I take a long time to decide what to write because I usually feel I haven’t done enough research to share my views on something. This is why most of my writing are book reviews or notes or comments on what others have written. Those serve twin purposes. Firstly, it forces me to truly engage with whatever material I’m reading. Following the Feynman Technique, I don’t doubt that teaching others is the best way one learns....

Introduction I picked up Relationships: A Mess Worth Making by Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp (ISBN: 9780977080762) as I prepared for a church Growth Group study session. Lane and Tripp are well respected in evangelical circles and I had read their How People Change book a few years ago. However, over the years, I haven’t spent much time reading “Christian Living” books. The main reason being that I have a lot of books I’d like to read and not enough time....

Introduction My “productivity” journey really began sometime in 2019 shortly after the Malaysian government declared a nationwide lockdown, called a Movement Control Order (MCO), in March. I went home and struggled (like many) to juggle manage my time and energy well. Since then, I’ve read books and articles, listened to podcasts, watched videos, talked to others to try to build systems and processes to be a good steward of my time....

Introduction The last “political theological” book I read was D. A. Carson’s Christ and culture revisited. I summarised that work as leaning towards a biblical-theology treatment of the study as a critique and corrective to Reinhold Niebuhr’s models of how Christ and culture relate to each other. Os Guinness' is more cultural or social critic than biblical scholar, and it shows. He bases many of his arguments on Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, writing in the introduction that “the vision of freedom outlined here owes everythign to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and the wise and brilliant understanding of Rabbi Sacks…”...

This post was originally written and published on 28 April 2021. William B. Eerdmans Publishing, a respected Christian publisher, recently released their Spring/Summer 2021 academic catalogue. The highlight is probably the launch of a new commentary Commentaries for Christian Formation (CCF) series, with N. T. Wright’s Galatians being the inaugural volume. Apparently, this is the first major biblical commentary that Wright has written, and on Galatians too! We shouldn’t be surprised if there are swift responses (detractors?...

How are you? Her answer is always simply “I’m fine, thank you. And you?” But she never spoke of the Shadow, The weight of Nothing that stops her lips From articulating some Fear she knows She feels, but knows not from which cell it spawned. For speech is as inadequate At expression As people are at empathy. She wants to say, sing, shout – be heard. But words can offer no pity;...

Updated on 8 May 2021. I’m trying to build a new website using Hugo. This is the most techie I’ve been since I first downloaded and used Logseq. At that time, I also had to learn how to setup my own GitHub account. It was painful, but the experience was worth it. It feels good when I can wrestle with a problem and solve it. I’m out of my depth but this is legitimately exciting....

I finished this book a few weeks back and tried a new note-taking approach. I would write a one-sentence summary after each chapter, then type a mixture of quotes and notes. Overall, I think this helped with comprehension and retention. Next up: create my own Zettelkasten. Meanwhile, here’s my review of the book in a new format based on Mental Pivot’s book notes. Summary G. E. Ladd’s The Gospel of the Kingdom is a short treatment on the New Testament’s (NT) “Kingdom of God” (KoG) theme....

Carson’s great strength in this book is avoiding the temptation of offering a ‘totalising’ model of how Christians (whether as individuals or as a ‘church’) ought to relate to the wider culture. As the title suggests, he begins this book by engaging with Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Christ and Culture,’ especially in considering the five models that Niebuhr identifies. I haven’t read Niebuhr’s work, but I found Carson’s treatment of Niebuhr’s work refreshingly even-handed....