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What Makes History So Important as a Discipline
Posted on October 29, 2011 by Steve Weaver
In a recent interview on Thinking in Public with Professor Thomas Albert Howard of Gordon College (author of God and the Atlantic: America, Europe and the Religious Divide), Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. makes a great observation about the importance of history as a discipline. While discussing the unique perspective which Professor Howard’s book has brought to modern historiography through the asking of a question never before asked, Dr. Mohler waxed eloquent about the benefit of continued historical research.
I do think that a book like this can catch up by something of a surprise. We read it and are informed by it. Our thinking is reshaped by it, and our intellectual curiosities are fired by it. And one of the questions that comes to mind is, why didn’t someone ask this question before? That’s what makes history so important as a disciple. It’s not just the same questions are being asked over and over again, it’s that top flight historical minds are attracted to new questions, and of course to new periods of history and to asking very new questions about even some of the periods we think we actually know a great deal about. There is always more to learn. A book like this makes that point emphatically clear.
Copied and pasted from Podcast Transcript.
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Limited Time to Stock Up on 1984 NIV
Posted on October 27, 2011 by Steve Weaver
Some of you may not be aware, but this year (2011) there was a major revision of the NIV. This revision makes the NIV less faithful to the original text by making it “gender-neutral.” For more details about this revision, see here (
http://www.dennyburk.com/critiquing-gender-language-in-the-new-niv/
).
The point of this post, however, is to let you know that if you see yourself using the NIV in the future, you should probably stock up on the 1984 version. The bad news is that you won’t be able to get these for long, because they are being replaced with the new 2011 version. The good news is that you can get the 1984 edition for deeply discounted prices as they are being closed out. See here for special savings from CBD on the 1984 NIV.
As most of you know, my preferred translation is the ESV and I recommend that you switch to using it or the HCSB. I believe that these two translations will be those most widely used for at least the next generation. They both maintain the readability of the NIV while at the same time being closer to the original text. But, if you want to stay with the NIV (which is perfectly fine in many ways), I recommend that you stock up with the 1984 edition currently being offered at CBD.
For those concerned with those reading anything other than the KJV, please see my series on Bible translations from several years ago linked below. I know this series doesn’t answer every question, but it could be a good starting place to think about these issues.
1. The Necessity and Purpose of Bible Translations
2. The History of Bible Translations
3. Why Are There So Many Bible Translations?
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