Some miscellaneia

Here are an assortment of things for this week.  First, Crossway has posted their Summer/Fall book catalogue for 2010.  There are some good looking books on here by Piper and some edited by Carson worth getting excited about.  There's also a book coming out on B.B. Warfield's theology that looks pretty valuable.

Second, L. Roy Taylor has put a brief paper up in outline format on the strengths and weaknesses of our system of church polity in the PCA.  I think that he makes a lot of valuable points here and the encouragement at the end is one we should give a hearty "Amen" to.

Third, here's a good post from Ron DiGiacomo, a ruling elder in the OPC, on the place of deduction and induction in presuppositional apologetics.  This is pretty valuable to read because the false accusation that is often heard from classical apologists is that presuppositional apologetics rejects the use of logic in favor of simply asserting presuppositions or first premises.  This is certainly not true as anyone who has read more than the first few pages of Van Til, Frame, Bahnsen, Oliphint, or Edgar could see.  However it is good to see how a transcendental argument for God's existence (transcendental is a far better term for Van Til apologetic method than presuppositional) should be built using deductive and inductive reasoning without a Christian framework.  The last part of that sentence is important because when we set the Lord Jesus apart as holy in our minds before giving an answer to those who ask a reason for the hope that is within us (1 Pet. 3:15) then we find that even the method of our apologetic will start from a Christian foundation.