Adiaphora
Finally listened to this late-July episode of Radiolab, and it is excellent. Great discussions on the human and his death, with some interesting and horrifying implications for life if some of these folks’ theories are true.
Freedom is Not Self-Creation
“To live the active life of holy fellowship with God is, therefore, to live out of the event of freedom from sin and death. Evangelical freedom is the freedom that comes from not being finally responsible for my own being; by the mercy of God I am restored to know myself to be a creature in fellowship with my creator and savior. And to such freedom I cannot liberate myself: self-liberation is precisely the ‘yoke of slavery’ (Gal. 5:1) from which I have been set free.
Liberated and proteted in this way, I am set free to live in the truth. Modern accounts of freedom identify freedom as unfettered liberty for self-creation, and therefore contrast freedom and nature: freedom is the antithesis of the given, a move against and beyond any sense that I have a determinate identity. Evangelical freedom, by contrast, does not envisage being human as an utterly original making of life and history. Rather, to be human is to live and act in conformity to the given truth (nature) of what I am – a creature of grace, a reconciled sinner and caught up in the movement of the ways and works of God in which I am pointed to a perfection to be revealed in the last times.”
[John Webster, Holiness, 93–94]
![“The world’s first wooden bridge designed to handle heavy traffic loads,” beautifully done in Sneek, the Netherlands.
[Metropolis POV  » Building Bridges]](http://5.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ks6ue093FI1qz54swo1_500.jpg)
“The world’s first wooden bridge designed to handle heavy traffic loads,” beautifully done in Sneek, the Netherlands.
Hitchens (partly) on Doug Wilson
“Wilson isn’t one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just ‘metaphors.’ He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn’t waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he ‘allows’ it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing.”
Despite Our Opposition He Maintains His Name
Bavinck, on the name of God, YHWH: “This name is not arbitrary: God reveals himself in the way he does because he is who he is. Summed up in his name, therefore, is his honor, his fame, his excellencies, his entire revelation, his very being. Upon those to whom it is revealed, therefore, the name confers special privileges and imposes unique obligations. … By his name God puts himself in a certain relation to us, and the relation we assume to him must be congruent with it.”
This revealing, this giving of his name is mercy: if it were up to us, Bavinck says, we would be silent about it, try to forget it, and disown it. “We take no delight in the knowledge of his ways. We tend to continually oppose his names: his independence, sovereignty, righteousness, and love, and resist him in all his perfections. But it is God himself who reveals all his perfections and puts his names on our lips. It is he who gives himself these names and who, despite our opposition, maintains them. It is of little use to us to deny his righteousness: every day he demonstrates this quality in history. And so it is with all his attributes. The final goal of all his ways is that his name will shine out in all his works and be written on everyone’s forehead.”
[Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2: God and Creation, 99, 127]
A Precarious Foothold
“The defenders of the single meaning theory usually concede that the medieval approach to the Bible met the religious needs of the Christian community, but that it did so at the unacceptable price of doing violence to the biblical text. The fact that the historical-critical method after two hundred years is still struggling for more than a precarious foothold in that same religious community is generally blamed on the ignorance and conservatism of the Christian laity and the sloth or moral cowardice of its pastors.
I should like to suggest an alternative hypothesis. The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues, is false. Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted—as it deserves to be—to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred.”
[David Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” in Stephen Fowl, The Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 37
“ It’s precisely here that the filioque could function to safeguard the church’s confession of the gospel. The role of the filioque is to tie the Spirit’s work indissolubly to God’s act in Christ; to confess that the action of the Spirit is part of the story of salvation-history, and not some independent avenue of God’s presence in the world. A Spirit who proceeds simply “from the Father” can very easily be understood as a second way of salvation, operating remoto Christo and floating free of the events of salvation-history. ”
A great post from Ben Myers at Faith and Theology: Why I (still) confess the filioque
Super Excited about this publication, one column per language per page. Should be pretty helpful, but not in a word-for-word sort of way since both the NIV and FIN‘92 are more dynamic equivalence translations. Still awesome though.
Free PDF: The 1662 Book of Common Prayer as printed by John Baskerville (set in digital type, not actual photographs).
“ The church [in America] is really no longer the place where the congregation hears and preaches God’s word, but rather the place where one acquires secondary significance as a social entity for this or that purpose. ”
» Dietrich Bonhoeffer [via Ben Myers]
Bonhoeffer on American Seminary Students
Let’s not be like these guys:
The students at one seminary “are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level…. In contrast to our own [German] liberalism, which in its better representatives doubtless was a genuinely vigorous phenomenon, here all that has been frightfully sentimentalised, and with an almost naive know-it-all attitude. … A seminary in which numerous students openly laugh during a public lecture because they find it amusing when a passage on sin and forgiveness from Luther’s de servo arbitrio is cited has obviously, despite its many advantages, forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for.”
Surly, Pompous Spitters. Perfect.
“If the world is fundamentally an accident, if in the beginning, there was no eternal personality, no eternal living being, merely super-hot, hyper-dense I AM matter (with no space and no universe outside of itself), and if, wandering those hyper-dense, super tiny corridors of the Forever Matter, attending to its normal routine, there happened to be one little chemical that caught its toe and flopped into another very different chemical, and both of them said, ‘Oh, crap,’ in tiny voices and went deaf in the explosion, then when did the accident start making sense and why the hell do we have the Special Olympics?
Is it strange that an impersonal accident should start talking about itself, that shards of matter rocketing through space/time would start making burbling noises and pretend that they’re communicating with other shards, and that their burbling truthfully explained the accident? Is it strange to you that an accident would invent baseball and walruses and Englishmen?
If a hypothetical neutral observer had watched the birth of an ever-expanding universe from the womb of an accidental fireball, was he (or she or it) surprised when the explosion invented llamas? You see, for me, llamas are entirely consistent with the personality of an easily amused God. A prank on the Andes and everyone who ever needed to use the long-necked pack-sweaters. Surly, pompous, comically unaware of their own looks, spitters. Perfect. Tell me a story about the great god Boom. Tell me how he accidentally made llamas from hydrogen.”
[N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl, 128]
