Tag: Blogging

Poll: Which Do You Read More, Books or Blogs?

~ Bob Hayton ~ 11 Comments

Blogs are a great source of information, each post can educate you on a specific topic. Trying to keep up with all the great blogs out there is what makes blogging fun. But it can be burdensome too, at times. So most bloggers have seasons where they stay away from all blogs for a time.

In my three years of blogging, I’ve noticed another side-effect of blogging. At times I get interested in books more, but often I find myself reading books less. The more blogs I follow the less book reading time I have. Personally, I think reading a well-written substantive book is more impactful than getting lots of information piecemeal over the web. But then I like the variety of the piecemeal info, too!

So let’s run a poll here. Which do you read more, books or blogs? And which is more important ultimately? Any thoughts on how blogging and book-reading are at odds with each other? Or do you think there’s a symbiotic relationship and blogging encourages more book-reading? I’m asking for you the reader to respond! Thanks in advance for those who do 🙂 .

Bob's Blog Finds: The Apostolic Hermeneutic

~ fundyreformed ~ 4 Comments

In my blog finds I highlight some of the best articles I’ve found online recently. You can see all my blog finds (courtesy of Google Reader) in the sidebar.

It’s been a long while since I posted a Bobspotted Blogroll post. With Google Reader, it’s easier to share my posts one by one. Rather then abandon the blogspot idea altogether, I plan on posting Blog Finds posts where I share articles or links one at a time. This will allow more interaction from you, my readers, and I hope it will serve my blog readers well.

Proponents of Biblical Theology, particularly those who hold to redemptive historical hermeneutics, often speak of the apostolic hermeneutic. We see how the Apostle’s interpreted the OT Bible and draw lessons for how we should interpret it as well.

Now this approach is often misunderstood or even maligned by other Bible scholars, particularly dispensationalists. R. Scott Clark addresses this issue in an excellent post (actually a re-post) at his Heidelblog. I’ll provide some excerpts and encourage you to read the excellent post for yourself. He provides book recommendations for where to pursue this hermeneutical approach further, too.

It’s isn’t that complicated. Pay close attention here: Â The Apostolic hermeneutic is to see Christ at the center of all of Scripture. We’re not reading him Â into Scripture. We’re refusing to read him out of it. There, I said it. That’s what it is. Perhaps the reason our dispensational friends cannot see it is because they are blinded by their rationalism. They know Â a priori what the organizing principle of Scripture Â must be and it isn’t God the Son, it’s national Israel….

Yes, Reformed folk (and others) have been reading the bible like this for a very long time. The earliest post-apostolic Christians, in contrast to the Jewish critics of the Christian faith, read the Bible to teach a unity of salvation organized around Jesus Christ. The entire medieval church read the Bible this way as did the Reformation and post-Reformation churches….

What method do we use? It’s grammatical and historical! It reads the Old in the light of the new. It doesn’t set up arbitrary Â a priori‘s about what can and can’t be. We don’t begin with an unstated premise, “All reasonable people know p.” We don’t think that any uninspired hermeneutic (system of interpretation) is superior to Paul’s or James’ or Peter’s.

One need not be inspired to read the Bible the way the apostles did. I’m not even sure it’s proper to say that their hermeneutic was inspired. We confess that Scripture is inspired, but was their way of reading Scripture inspired? I doubt it. As John Frame used to ask in class, were the apostolic grocery lists inspired? No. Can we observe Â how they read Scripture and imitate it? Yes….

Read the rest of the post for yourself. And let me know what you think of it.

Life and Blogging

~ fundyreformed ~ 1 Comment

Sorry about the philosophical title. I’m not throwing in the towel or anything.

I’ve started learning Hebrew this semester with The Bethlehem Institute, my church’s seminary quality training school. So I’ve got lots of homework! Got to lear my Aleph, Beta, and Gimels! You can see my friend Shaun Tabbat, blog about our class on his blog. He’s re-learning it, so I envy him!

For the blog I have many plans. Too many and not enough time. And worse, I don’t have high speed internet at home, and my connection has been quite poor. I’ve finally given in and am going to move up to DSL, so that might help.

I hope to finish the overview pages that you’ll find at all the tabs at the top of the blog. I’d like to finish a few unfinished series around here, and start another. I’m also planning on continuing to include more book reviews and Music Monday posts. I’d also like to work on my family photo blog and move it somewhere, and maybe I’ll revive my currently stalled Mission blog. I’d like to keep it, but I don’t want to use Blogger, and I’m partially moved over to Tumblr.org, but now I’m thinking WordPress might be easier. We’ll see!

Just wanted to give an update on life and blogging. Hopefully posts will be more regular around here again soon.

Building a Better Blog

~ fundyreformed ~ 5 Comments

Most of you who read my blog, are bloggers yourselves. So we’re all interested in improving our blogs — doing more with them and making sure they are worth maintaining.

I thought the tips given by Abraham Piper in a guest post at Between Two Worlds, would be helpful to share. He approaches blogging as a service for our readers, and I thought that approach was helpful.

Here’s his post title and link. Let me know what you think.

12 Ways to Improve Your Blog by Serving Your Readers: What I Didn’t Say at Band of Bloggers (HT: Shane Vander Hart)

Following Comments with Co.mments

~ fundyreformed ~ 7 Comments

From time to time, I like to post blogging tips. Today is one of those times 🙂 .

If you are like me, every once in a while you put your toe into the discussion area beneath a blog post. And yes, at times I jump in with both feet. Now commenting can be fun—and with fundamentalists, sometimes it’s outright scary! Hey I’m a Calvinist so debating shouldn’t scare me, but it can and does zap me of energy and will power, every once in a while.

So if I happen to forget about some discussion I was having, a day or two could go by without me responding to a response to my comment. Or I may have enjoyed reading the discussion and wanted to follow it, but with the hustle and bustle of life, I’ve just simply forgot about it. Or worse, I can’t remember where I said that, or what it was that I was reading.

I’ve been looking for a tool to help with this problem for some time. I know with certain blog types, I can subscribe to the comments of a particular post. but I wanted all my current conversations in one place.

Well recently, I stumbled across Co.mments. And I found my solution!

Co.mments lets you easily track conversations on just about any blog. You can add a button to your browser toolbar, and just click “Track co.mments” when you are on a post you want to track. It doesn’t seem to work with forums as well, but it works great with blogs.

You receive email updates with the comment(s) already in the email. Plus there is an option from within the email to remove the conversation from your tracking page. The only drawback is that you will always get an email with all the comments that were there before you started tracking new comments. Perhaps they’ll fix that ultimately. It’s still a great tool, regardless.

So check it out. Start tracking co.mments today!