One of the demands of any polemical exchange is the demand of naming. In every dispute, both sides always want to define the nature of the dispute. This need to name properly is not optional for the party that is in the right. Everyone has to do it. But when one of the parties is …
Curricular Development
Visionaries, Secular fundamentalists like Duane really crack me up. Evil? What’s that? And when Duane accused me of anti-Semitism, I confessed to you all earlier that I was nonplussed. I was like a congressman who had found a copy of the Constitution. I honestly did not know what he was talking about. But when I …
The Central Thing
Speaking of the doctrine of Scripture, N.T. Wright says, “But such a doctrine usually has to be inferred. It may well be possible to infer it, but it is not (for instance) what Isaiah or Paul are talking about. Nor is it, for the most part, what Jesus is talking about in the gospels. He …
Kidding Yourself
“There is no way that young men can watch, and be entertained by, movies which include displays of nudity, steamy sex scenes, and so forth, without being aroused by them. A boy who tells his mother that he can ‘handle it’ is using what astute theologians in former ages used to call ‘a lie'” (Future …
All Particulars
Our Father in Heaven, we glorify Your name, and we do so through Jesus’ name. Father, Your kindness to us extends into all particulars, and we are very grateful for the opportunity to rest before You in this way. We rejoice in the fact that it is through the rest of Your saints that the …
Petty Traditions
John Robbins continues to display one of his chief polemical attributes, which is kind of a bad attribute for a rationalist to have, to wit, his inability to follow an argument. He has recently said that one of our tactics is that of quoting John Calvin, who said “some foolish things about the sacraments.” He …
Hostility and Discrimination
In the alternative universe of some, mere assertion substitutes for argument. An assertion that Christ Church, NSA, and other ministries, should start “obeying the law,” is enough to persuade a certain kind of mind that we must not have been obeying the law. But of course, in a sober kind of universe, this kind of …
Private Judgment
Dear Joel, Thank you for bearing with my delay as I have been doing two things. First, I have been assembling my thoughts on this complicated issue, and secondly, I have been looking for an opportunity to lay them out in systematic fashion. In the letters that follow, I am not assuming that every issue …
Benedict XVIII
I have opened a new category for my blog here. Under Roman or Catholic? I hope to post my thoughts on the Roman Catholic Church (in the form of letters to a friend thinking about returning to Rome). While some of these letters are not fictional, some of them will simply be in that form …
Authoritative Story
In a lecture delivered in 1989, N.T. Wright offered a number of provocative thoughts on what it means to say that the Bible is authoritative. While I want to offer some criticisms of some of his points and/or applications, I should say at the outset that some of his points were superb, and were exactly …