Yesterday was something of a circus maximus. For those of you following all this (and there are quite a few), I have been trying to arrange a meeting with Terry Morin for over two years now. When he recently decided to post his affidavits on his web site, I decided that it was finally time to respond publicly to the charges he was making (although he always would make them from a safe distance). That is what was behind some of my recent (and pretty lengthy) posts. Yesterday, I received word that Terry had signalled his willingness to take down his web site if I would take down my posts responding to him. I indicated my willingness to do this in principle, but did not want to do anything that was not part of a complete biblical approach to reconciliation. But through a miscommunication (which, in these circumstances is easy), Terry thought the arrangement was already made to start with this process when I actually had not agreed to it. So he took down his web site, and independently I proceeded to post a new installment on mine. After the understandable hey!, I deleted my most recent post which was a response to something that Terry had only had up for a few hours. For the time being, the rest of the posts remain, but I will certainly take them down as soon as I am assured that there is a good faith effort underway to approach reconciliation biblically. This may seem like overkill to some (like Absalom forcing a meeting by setting Joab’s fields on fire), but it really is necessary. It seems to me that two evangelical Christians living in the same town should be able to arrange a meeting — although this is not to say that a simple meeting will solve everything. There are other issues involved, like that two hundred bucks.
On a related front, part of the reason yesterday was such a circus was an interview I had with Michael Horton for The White Horse Inn. It was a cordial exchange, and I really appreciated them making the effort to keep our discussions open. I am not sure when that interview will air. Not surprisingly, the two major issues we talked about were justification by faith alone, and . . . slavery. But in one of life’s little ironies, one of the things I had to do in the course of the discussion on slavery was defend and explain a quote from an early edition of Credenda that defended the South. The quote I had to explain and put in context was something Terry Morin had written. As my daughter Bekah put it last night, the irony was “quite festive.”