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

Last Friday I had the pleasure of seeing in concert one of my favorite bands, Punch Brothers. They put on an expected incredible show, leaving all excited and taken aback by their virtuosity, precision and just plain raw talent that is shown in their music. The band is lead vocally and on the mandolin by Chris Thile, formerly of Nickel Creek, who without a doubt is one of the most talented musicians I have ever had the pleasure of seeing live. The other musicians in the band are no exception, each being a virtuoso on his instrument and pushing the envelope of progressive bluegrass to new levels. I highly recommend their album Punch, and encourage all who can to check this band out. These are a few pics I got during the show. Enjoy!

The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars.

-The Superstition of School, 1923

Related resources: Pennington on the Gospel of John

[HT: Andy Naselli at Between Two Worlds]

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…