The Logos Bible Software Blog
Since its inception, Proclaim Church Presentation Software was designed to help your team collaborate on beautiful church presentations quickly. The second generation of Proclaim takes that to a whole new level. New features and an updated interface make the software faster and more intuitive. Combine that with more built-in automation and you have a powerful time-saver.
Your entire team can try the all-new Proclaim free for 30 days.
We don’t just learn from theology, but also from those who have gone before us—both from their writings and their lives. John Piper described with powerful imagery his experience with reading the Puritans:
No one comes close to the skill they have in taking the razor-like scalpel of Scripture, and lancing the boils of my corruption, cutting out the cancers of my God-belittling habits of mind, and amputating the limbs of my disobedience. They are simply in a class by themselves.
One of the best ways to prepare yourself for any theological question is by having a well-rounded library. When you have a large library that includes a diverse array of books, topics, and authors, you’re queries will return more results and you’ll likely get more relevant results.
The search functionality in Logos is similar to a search engine’s algorithm—the more websites a search engine has to crawl, the better your search results. Similarly, the more books Logos has to search through, the more relevant results you’ll get to answer your query.
The Mega Pack is no more, but you can still get 90% off a theological library— plus a set of digital tools that will deliver even more insight for your Bible study. Learn more about the huge library and smart tools in our base packages.
This Christmas, experience the joy of building your library with the 500 Book Mega Pack, 2015 Edition. This bundle includes 500 titles that would cost you $8,000.69 if bought separately. But by getting the titles in this bundle, you can save $7,500.70! That’s 500 books for 500 bucks.
The 500 Book Mega Pack, 2015 Edition is a Christmas exclusive, and will be unavailable forever after 11:59pm, December 31.
This Christmas, we’ve cooked up some awesome deals to help you expand your library. For a limited time, you can enjoy 15% off a Logos 6 base package, save 94% with a 500-book bundle, get up to 50% off any Mobile Ed course, and more! Don’t miss out on this year’s Christmas specials.
Imagine being one of the first people to use Facebook. Without many others to connect with, would the social media company hold any value to you? Probably not.
But add a couple dozen of your close friends to the site, and suddenly you’d probably start to care—at least a little bit. Add another couple dozen coworkers, a few people from your small group, your kids, a hundred or so people from your alma mater, and a few of your favorite companies, and suddenly you’re checking Facebook every day. As more people join Facebook, the site’s value increases, and chances are the value increases exponentially, not linearly, as each additional person joins the site.
The books in your Logos library are interconnected, like friends on Facebook. And the more books you add to your library, the more connections, or links, your library has between books. This causes the value of your books to increase exponentially as you add more. This Christmas season, the most affordable way to add hundreds of books to your library is the 500 Book Mega Pack, 2015 Edition.
Here’s how the Mega Pack will give you better search results and super-charge your library.
Put down the eggnog, drop the tinsel, and worry about untangling the Christmas lights later. Logos just launched a Christmas-exclusive deal that’s so good it won’t be around long, and you don’t want to miss it!
Introducing the limited-time 500 Book Mega Pack, 2015 Edition. With this bundle you can save 94% on 500 books. This bundle was designed to be too good to last, and at midnight on December 31, 2015, it will disappear forever. We’re not going to raise the price of this bundle and sell it somewhere else, and we’re not going to bring it back at a later date, either. Come January 1, this amazing deal will be gone for good.
Karl Barth: May 10, 1886-1968
Karl Barth (May 10, 1886–1968) and Cornelius Van Til (May 3, 1895–1987) tend to be polarizing figures in church theology. Van Til was a firm opponent of Barth’s theology, arguing that it was fundamentally flawed and anti-biblical. Despite their sharp differences, Barth and Van Til were similar in that they were both strongly influenced by the work of John Calvin.
In Church Dogmatics, The Epistle to the Romans, Barth states, “Calvin’s theology interests us in its historical context as an outstanding record of Reformation theology that historically—and at times even legally—has served as a basis of proclamation in modern Protestant churches.”
In The Case for Calvinism, Van Til responds to The Case for a New Reformation, The Case for Theology in Liberal Perspective, and The Case for Orthodox Theology. He challenges their views “by setting the truly Christ-centered position of the historic Protestant faith, especially the historic Reformed Faith as found in Calvin and his followers.”
To celebrate the birthdays of Van Til and Barth, Logos Bible Software is offering:
$50 off The Works of Cornelius Van Til—use coupon code VANTIL13 until May 11.
$50 off Barth’s Church Dogmatics—coupon code BARTH13, until May 11.
Eric Sigward, guest blogger and former student of Van Til, wrote the following about Barth and Van Til.
Van Til and Barth on the Celebration of Barth’s birthday, 2013
By Eric H. Sigward
Cornelius Van Til: May 3, 1895-1987.
When I entered Westminster Seminary as a freshman in 1975, I was fortunate enough to take Van Til’s last official class as an emeritus professor, “Karl Barth and the Word of God.” My first sessions with the great professor were “buzzing and blooming confusions,” as Van Til used to say. The terms were so large and the relationships so confusing that I despaired of ever understanding what he was saying. Eventually, I got an A– in the class and became a good friend of Van Til’s. It is with the memory of this initial confusion in mind that I approach writing about Van Til and Barth. I wish to show sympathy for those who are not familiar with these men or their theologies. As Van Til once said, “American evangelicals know absolutely nothing about Karl Barth.” I am trying to avoid shutting down the lines of communication between my subjects and you.
Van Til felt that Barth showed a verbal similarity to orthodox Protestantism and yet a thorough-going denial of its contents. Barth was not orthodox, but neo-orthodox. How is it that we Christians can criticize and label the philosophy of another professed Christian as heretical? It is on the basis of Reformed theology’s doctrine of the total depravity of man whereby the natural man denies the authority of God in any area of his life and sets himself up as his own authority (and god). By grace, however, God has penetrated the natural man’s defenses, has given him a new birth and a new trust in the infallibility, inerrancy, and authority of Scripture. With faith in Christ, God gives man faith in his Word. Thus, Christians may criticize error based upon this new epistemological certainty, based upon this new birth in Christ that brings with it all of God’s gracious provisions of salvation, including the mysterious testimony of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. We now naturally recognize one another.
Van Til thought Barth had reworked all the essentials of Reformed Christianity. In a nutshell, Barth had massively changed the traditional doctrine of election into a fabrication that Christ was simultaneously the only eternally elect and the only eternally reprobate man—reprobate upon the cross and elect in the Resurrection. Beware, however, that these “events” did not take place in history at all but in “Geschichte.” This is dialecticisim—espousing one thing and the opposite at the same time. In Barth, it is exhaustively applied to God and all knowledge: We both know and don’t know God at the same time.
Such a myth, fable, or fabrication did not take place in space and time at all but in Geschichte, where eternal history takes place. That is to say, Barth had an uber-system and an uber-realm that would color all other theological statements. Since one wire of orthodox theology can be cut, why not cut them all—the doctrines of Scripture, creation, man, Christ, and salvation? Pursuing the mission of higher criticism and neo-orthodoxy, Barth would translate (Umdeutung) all our words into an ingenious system that resembled Christianity but was not Christian. Fortunately, over the years, Barth has not borne fruit as a church or as a movement. Christians have dropped him or never known him at all, and the only place we find Barthians today is in university seminars made up of graduate students.