Sunday, February 28, 2010

Some inspiring Christian resources

I'm going to recommend a couple of video teachings I've learned about recently, both of them great boosts to Christian understanding and worship. My brother lent me both of these, and I'm very thankful.

I've only seen the first half of The Truth Project, but I have to say I can tell where it's going because where it's been is already good enough to recommend the whole thing. This is a twelve-part series of classroom style lectures that aims to lay out a systematic and comprehensive Christian Worldview. It succeeds.

C. S. Lewis said: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The Truth Project is an attempt to outline the Everything-Else that the sun of Christianity reveals. I think that Christians who have been struggling along with a half-worldly view of life without realizing it will be invigorated and inspired by this series of teachings.

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The other recommended teaching is The Bethlehem Star which is an engaging introduction to astronomical signs related to the birth and death of Christ, the star over Bethlehem announcing His birth of course being the main focus, but other heavenly phenomena as well.

The blurb:
The Star demonstration is a multimedia presentation by lawyer and law professor Rick Larson. In a presentation seen by many tens of thousands live on stage and many tens of millions on television, Larson leads you sleuthing through Biblical and many other historical clues. He then pilots a computer model of the universe across the skies of 2000 years ago as you watch. At these presentations, you will see the striking celestial events the ancients saw.
It reminded me of a book I have but never really read, The Witness of the Stars by E. W. Bullinger, written in 1893, that is a very thorough treatise on how the stars and planets, the constellations and even the signs of the zodiac, were originally meant to show the gospel story. That book has become much more meaningful to me after seeing The Bethlehem Star.

Psalm 19 comes alive in a new way with these studies:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
On reading around in Bullinger's book I was intrigued to recognize that if Larson is right about the dating of Jesus' birth, then Bullinger had the wrong date and so missed it, of course missing the celestial signs that attended it, and so did Kepler for the same reason. Interesting sleuthing going on here.