Chesterton on Education

With the school year blossoming anew, students scurrying off to buy lunch boxes, crayons, colored pencils, $300 worth of theology textbooks, one could easily get wrapped up in all the hustle and bustle of the wonderful and enchanting life of education. Yet there is a danger to eduction. G.K. Chesterton gives a warning that is very timely; one could say, timeless…

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

Michael Miller lectures on “The Victory of Socialism”

Michael Miller, Director of Programs at the Acton Institute, delivered a lecture on “The Victory of Socialism,” and its effects on the family, religion, philosophy, arts, and culture. The video can be found HERE

Interview with Jonathan Pennington

Matthew Montonini interviews Jonathan Pennington of SBTS on his life, academics, and church.

Related resources: Pennington on the Gospel of John

[HT: Andy Naselli at Between Two Worlds]

Paul Helm on The Drama of Doctrine

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…

Robbie Sagers’ pithy point about McLaren’s Voting Advice

Here it is,

Brian McLaren gives the various factors he considers when deciding how to cast his vote. “And my understanding of environmental stewardship obligates me to ask what’s best for birds of the air, flowers of the field, and fish of the sea too. Since they don’t have a vote, I need to try to speak on their behalf,” McLaren says. Perhaps someone should alert Mr. McLaren–a supporter of Barack Obama for president–that unborn children don’t exactly have a vote, either. (Robert E. Sagers)

New Website for the Andrew Fuller Center

This site is for the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist studies and houses the blog of Michael Haykin.

Here is the link

Ben Witherington Reviews The Shack

Here is the review.

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