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Published during: April 2012

More on Jesus + Nothing = Everything

It occurred to me, as I thought about the post I put up last week as a response to Tullian Tchividjian’s Jesus + Nothing = Everything that a reader might come away with a negative impression of the book. That is not a great outcome for a book response, and it highlights the potential issues with the sorts of off-the-cuff remarks I offered there. (That, in fact, is part of the reason it is filed under its own category, “Book Responses,” instead of the main “Book Review” category.) So: an addendum, which comprises a clarification and nearly a correction to the previous post. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Jesus + Nothing = Everything

From time to time I’ll be writing book responses, like this one – shorter than my formal reviews, and more a quick snapshot of my thoughts in response to the book than a careful dissection of the work.

Tullian Tchividjian’s1 Jesus + Nothing = Everything was, in one sense, a great book. In another, it was just okay. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Were we to attempt to go over the whole subject [of the divine perfections in the creation of the world] we should never come to a conclusion, there being as many miracles of divine power, as many striking evidences of wisdom and goodness, as there are classes of objects, nay as there are individual objects, great or small, throughout the universe.

—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure”— for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

—Revelation 19:6-8

An Aspen in a Forest of Pines

In an interesting piece in The Atlantic last week (“Life Without Sex: The Third Phase of the Asexuality Movement”), Rachel Hill highlighted David Jay and his organization, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network:

But what all asexual people have in common — and what defines asexuality as an orientation — is that, while they may have a desire to connect with other people, asexuals have no desire to connect with them sexually. Asexual people are not the same as celibate people: it’s not that they are purposefully or unintentionally abstaining from sex they would otherwise like to have, but rather that they have no interest in it.

The article is fascinating on several levels: its examination of asexuality as a “sexual orientation,” its exploration of the idea that for some people, sex just isn’t that important (however odd that may seem in our society), and its recognition that a sex-defined culture is perhaps not always beneficial. Read on, intrepid explorer →

If you want to find an instance of true gratitude for the infinite grace of God, do not go to those who think of God’s love as something that cost nothing, but go rather to those who in agony of soul have faced the awful fact of the guilt of sin, and then have come to know with a trembling wonder that the miracle of all miracles has been accomplished, and that the eternal Son has died in their stead.

—J. Gresham Machen, “What the Bible Teaches About Jesus,”
quoted in Rid of My Disgrace, by Lindsey A. Holcomb, Justin S. Holcomb