The Herman Bavinck Blog has posted the audio of a recent conference; speakers include Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Gaffin, David Van Druden, Gordon Graham, John A. Vissers, George Harinck, and many others. The topics range from “Bavinck and Reformed Epistemology,” to “Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms in the Thought of Herman Bavinck.”
Archive for the ‘Theology’ Category
An example of culturally-situated legalism from R. Kent Hughes:
In 1928 Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse was speaking at a conference in Montrose, Pennsylvania where about 200 young people were present. One day two women came to him in horror because some girls were not wearing stockings! These women wanted him to rebuke the others. Barnhouse’s reply is classic. As he tells it: ‘Looking them straight in the eye, I said, “the Virgin Mary never wore stockings.” They gasped and said, “She didn’t?” I answered, “In Mary’s time, stockings were unknown. So far as we know, they were first worn by prostitutes in Italy in the 15th century, when the Renaissance began. Later, a lady of the nobility wore stockings at a court ball, greatly to the scandal of many people. Before long, however, everyone in the upper classes was wearing stockings…” These ladies, who were holdovers from the Victorian epoch, had no more to say. I did not rebuke the girls for not wearing stockings. A year or two afterward, most girls in the United States were going without stockings in the summer, and nobody through anything about it. Nor do I believe that this led toward disintegration of moral standards in the United States. Times were changing, and the step away from Victorian legalism was all for the better.’
We have all become incredibly busy with school and the musings of life over the semester and therefore neglected blogging. Therefore, I have stripped down the blog in an effort that will make it easier to post and and be active on here.
-Brady
Paul Helm weighs in on Kevin Vanhoozers largely acclaimed tome The Drama of Doctrine; insisting that the theodrama is not as cut and dry as Vanhoozers makes it out to be, Helm says,
How does theology or, more pointedly, how does God himself get into theodrama? Not because he enters it as one of the players, for were he do so we would need to know from somewhere who this strange actor is. (Generalising, this is the problem of how biblical theology keeps its body and soul together without living off the earnings of systematic theology.) He gets into the drama (or more exactly, the narrative), only at points where the drama is suspended and the players receive a ‘creedal’ statement from their Creator or Author. The occurrence of those cited by Fretheim, and many more, are not part of the action of the biblical narrative. They interrupt it, and at the same time they control it. They are in the drama but not of it. They are statements, assertions, (i.e. speech-acts) which intrude into the narrative, interpreting it, and so telling us who the God of the narrative is.
Helms indictment is rather interesting because he accuses Vanhoozer of actually being more modernistic than he lets on.
It’s self-evidently modernist work, not of course by being an immediate product of the Enlightenment, but one which is nevertheless conducted in the spirit of the Enlightenment. For it does not seek to build on the past, not even to build on a re-jigged past, but to start over again. Fancy that. After two thousand years, starting all over again.
and again,
Kevin makes space for himself – clears the stage, so to say - by distancing his ideas from those of cognitivists (in the shape of Hodge) and expressivists (in the shape of Lindbeck). He tell us that he sits somewhere in the middle, borrowing from each. Yet the idea of such a division, or polarity, between expressivism and cognitivism, is itself a modern phenomenon, to be dated no earlier than the reaction to the logical positivism of the mid-20th century.
To be sure Helms critique is rather harsh, but it will be interesting to see how the responses develop…
30
Jul
The Power of Words
Our words have the power to heal and the power to destroy. It takes much skill to be able to maintain a good balance in one’s speech of truth and grace. As creatures who are made in the image of God, it is not suprising that our words have such great power. God spoke the world into being, but many times we speak and tear it apart. It is vital that we see our speech as a part of God’s redemptive plan to restore the entire cosmos and especially something so powerful as speech.
Here is a video of Paul Tripp dicussing the power of Words (Rated PG-13)
Here is a link to the Desiring God National Conference entitled “The Power of Words and the Wonder of God.”
J. W. Richards lectures on Myths Christians Believe About Wealthy and Poverty
[HT: Justin Taylor]
27
Jul
Quote from Tim Keller
Here is a quote from The Reason for God, pg 192.
“God did not inflict pain on someone else, but rather on the Cross absorbed the pain, violence, and evil of the world into himself. Therefore the God of the Bible is not like the primitive deities who demanded our blood for their wrath to be appeased. Rather, this is a God who becomes human and offers his own lifeblood in order to honor moral justice and merciful love so that someday he can destory all evil without destroying us.”
The Evangelical Theological Society’s annual conference will be held at the Rhode Island Convention Center this year, and from the looks of it, will be one worth attending. This years theme is “Text and Canon.” The Tentative Program Schedule can be found HERE.
The four plenary sessions are as follows:
“Old Testament Text” – Peter J. Gentry
“Old Testament Canon” – Stephen G. Dempster
“New Testament Text” – Daniel B. Wallace
“New Testament Canon” – Charles E. Hill
Registration and hotel information can be found HERE
20
Jul
Philippians 1:12-26
So I’ve been trying to post this for like 2 weeks but I’m tech retarded so its had to wait. I finished Schreiner’s book on interpreting the Pauline epistles, and I highly recomend it to anyone who’s had greek; his sections on diagraming and tracing are easy to understand.
In this section of Philippians we see Paul’s desire for the gospel to spread. In verses 12-13 Paul tells the Philippians that despite what one would expect, the gospel has advanced while Paul is imprisoned. Verse 13 gives good indication that Paul was imprisoned at Rome when he wrote this letter since he speaks of the praetorian guard and emphasis all of them (indicating that there were more than just a few). The people of Rome have become aware that Paul has been put in prison because of his belief in Christ, and I think that we can infer that some have believed on him. Not only has the gospel spread b/c of Paul’s circumstances, but the church has become bold to proclaim the gospel as well since they have seen Paul suffer for the gospel.
In verses 15-18a Paul expresses that there are rival motivations for preaching the gospel in Rome. Some preach with good motives knowing that Paul is there for the defending the gospel, and others preach from impure motives thinking that they can afflict Paul. These only think that they can cause Paul trouble, but we see that Paul rejoices over the proclamation of the gospel. These people proclaiming the gospel are indeed Christians since the relative pronoun refers back to brothers in verse 14, and since Paul is rejoicing the gospel they proclaim must be the true gospel. Why and how they are causing Paul affliction is unknown, but Paul is willing to suffer at the hands of both believers and unbelievers for the spread of the gospel.
Most translations have the word deliverance in verse 19, but I think salvation is more appropriate. The word is soteria which is always translated as salvation, and this is an allusion to Job 13:16. If we consider Job, we see that Job is in contention with God, and that his salvation is vindication before God. I think that is the same here in Philippians; Paul is not speaking of his deliverance from prison, but his vindication before. If this is true then we see that living the Christian life is not about individualism. Every member of the church is responsible for each other. Paul is confident that he will not be ashamed when he meets Christ, and knows that even in his death Christ will be glorified.
Paul now digresses here and discusses his own view of life and death. Paul believes that it is better to die in order to be with Christ, but he is also sure that the Philippians still need him. He also knows that if he continues to live it will be full of laboring for the gospel. In the end, Paul decides he would rather continue to live in order to help the Philippians in their walk with Christ. We see in this section how important the gospel and the church was for Paul. He would suffer all persecutions and hardships in order for the advance of the gospel in the world and in the lives of believers. Much of the American church, including myself, have sought our own comfort over the spread of the gospel. Paul calls us here to put aside ourselves and do the work of the gospel.
An article by Geerhardus Vos on the historical reliability of Scripture, appearing in the 1906 Princeton Theological Review, has been made available online. Here in an excerpt,
There is not a fact in which the Bible summons us to believe that is not the exponent of some great principle adapted to stir the depths of our religious life. The normal believer would feel the heart-beat of religion in every dogma and in every fact. To join in the outcry against dogma and fact means to lower the ideal of what the Christian consciousness ought normally to be to the level of the spiritual depression of our own day and generation. How much better that we should all strive to raise our drooping faith and to reënrich our depleted experience up to the standard of those blessed periods in the life of the Church, when the belief in Bible history and the religion of the heart went hand in hand and kept equal pace, when people were ready to lay down their lives for facts and doctrines, because facts and doctrines formed the daily spiritual nourishment of their souls.
[HT: R. Scott Clark]