Dear Joel, Thanks for your prompt reply. Let me suggest a format for our letters, if you don’t mind. I would like to respond to your letter in this one. After I do so, the ball is still in my court to move on to the next issue. If you respond to this response, then …
Timeless Truths?
In his essay on how the Bible can be authoritative, N.T. Wright takes issue with the concept of “timeless truths.” He allows that there is a sense in which the Bible is a repository of timeless truths, but he is generally at war with the concept. “All three methods I have outlined involve a certain …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Provisional Thinking and Dogmatism
“Over against both of these positions, I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the …
Unity and Doctrine
This is an important issue to settle. For it is obvious that the issues surrounding Calvinism are not a dispute about secondary matters like baptism or church government. For those who have followed closely, this whole debate actually centers on the full meaning of the gospel. How should we then approach brothers in the Lord …
The Text?
“Reading the New Testament seriously, at the present moment in Western culture, sounds so problematic that some may feel like giving it up. The vineyard is overcrowded and apparently unfruitful. But this response, too, would be inappropriate. Whatever one’s viewpoint, this text matters . . . Whether, therefore, one has a Christian or non-Christian point …