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David E. Timmer

David Timmer recently retired from teaching Religion at Central College in Pella, Iowa. He now has more time to devote to appreciating music, both as a listener and as a choral singer.

Essays

“Like the wideness of the sea?” 15 years later

Compelling Analogy by Steve Bouma-Prediger Lew Smedes was one of my esteemed teachers when I was a student at Fuller Theological Seminary in the mid-1980s. I vividly recall his stimulating class titled “Calvin and the Christian Life.” I had read his popular book “Sex for Christians” (Eerdmans, 1976) for a religion class as a student at Hope College in 1978 and read everything he wrote in the old Reformed Journal in the 1970s and 1980s. Lew was a larger-than-life person,…
David E. Timmer, Annie Reilly and Elizabeth Vander Haagen
September 1, 2014
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Invitational Apologetics

David E. Timmer The cover of Dan Meeter's e-book features a set of austerely elegant sacramental vessels rudely interrupted by a screaming red fire extinguisher. The visual incongruity effectively signals to the reader what will and won't be found inside: Meeter seeks to offer an invitational apologetic for Christian faith, one which does not depend on threats of hellfire, condemnations of other religions, or "evidence that demands a verdict." And he contends that this generous, non-defensive and non-coercive presentation of…
David E. Timmer
November 1, 2013
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Nick Wolterstorff, Magister

JUNE/JULY 2012 ESSAY by David E. Timmer After nearly forty years, the memory is still vivid. Nicholas Wolterstorff was delivering an address at the first Conference on Christianity and Politics, held at Calvin College in 1973. His topic, "Contemporary Christian Views of the State," was one that held great salience for an audience of evangelical academics and activists in the wake of a wounding war and a divisive presidential campaign. As a college senior, I found myself drawn to the…
David E. Timmer
June 1, 2012
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Christianity and Culture: Engagement or Triumph?

T. M. Moore's Culture Matters has a twofold goal: first, to provide a unified approach to cultural engagement from a Christian perspective, overcoming what H. Richard Niebuhr claimed in Christ and Culture to be a situation of permanent and inevitable pluralism within the faith; and second, to inspire evangelical Christians to overcome their passivity on cultural issues. Its appearance, along with other books such as D. A. Carson's Christ and Culture Revisited (Eerdmans, 2008), is an encouraging sign of reflection…
David E. Timmer
February 1, 2009
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Hitchens’ God Not So Good

Christianity has often profited from listening to its severest critics. Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Camus--all have perceived and expressed uncomfortable truths about religion, truths that believers needed to hear even when they were combined with much that was unpalatable. On the evidence of this desultory and sophomoric diatribe, Christopher Hitchens will not be joining that select company of Christianity's benefactors. He will no doubt be relieved to hear it. Hitchens, the British-born American pundit, has always cultivated the image of…
David E. Timmer
January 1, 2009
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Neither Secular nor Sectarian

James C. Kennedy and Caroline J. Simon, of the history and philosophy departments at Hope College, have written a remarkably candid and insightful book about the religious identity of their college, Can Hope Endure? A Historical Case Study in Christian Higher Education. They use this "local" history as a case study to illuminate much broader issues that affect faculty, students, and administrators at church-related colleges all over the map. In particular, they pose the question whether such colleges can simultaneously…
David E. Timmer
December 16, 2005
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Same-Sex Marriage:Crisis in Society, Summons to the Church

The debate over gay marriage that erupted in the United States during 2004 seems to have taken everyone by surprise --at least judging from the sputtering and apoplexy that has frequently replaced argument on both sides of the issue. Howard Dean's run for the Democratic presidential nomination, peaking in January, reminded voters of the Vermont civil union statute that Dean signed into law in 2000, offering a package of "marriage-like" benefits to samesex couples. But the concept of civil union,…
David E. Timmer
January 16, 2005