I recently had an email exchange with someone I shall call my “sane Baptist friend,” or SBF for short. He had some questions about the Auburn Avenue deal, and I thought our exchange might prove helpful to others. There are a couple back and forths here. For ease of following, my original words are underlined, …
Jesus or Aristotle?
I have to begin by saying that it should be self-evident that logical fallacies exist, and that they should be avoided. Having the mind of Christ includes avoiding the kinds of confusions and mistakes in reasoning that are so characteristic of our time. I think it was John Stott who said that fuzzy-mindedness is one …
Answering All the Questions
When trust breaks down, it is hard to say anything without the suspicious seizing upon whatever it is, and twisting it to suit themselves. This is just another way of saying that when trust breaks down, one of the first things that people forget is that affirmation of innocence until guilt is established and proven …
Upcoming Debate
I am looking forward to my debate with James White this fall. I am currently halfway through his book The Roman Catholic Controversy, which is actually quite good. I agree with bunches and bunches of it. The debate, for those not up to speed, has to do with whether Roman Catholics are members of the …
The Potency of Sola Fide
One of the reasons why John Robbins and Sean Gerety are not to be trusted is because of their deliberate misrepresentations, as has been shown in previous posts. But there is another problem that runs throughout the book, which would be better classified as an inability to grasp the argument. For example, consider this: “In …
A Handy Guide for Navigating Theological Controversies
For all those interested second-year seminary students who are watching the varied logomachies being undertaken on their behalf by their elders in the gates of Zion, it seems that someone ought to have prepared a handy guide like this long before now. But they haven’t, and you know how it goes. But you can’t tell …
Logic 101
Throughout their book, Robbins and Gerety show a genuine inability or unwillingness to engage with the arguments I present for the objectivity of the covenant. For example, one of my common illustrations for what I am talking about is the covenant of marriage. A husband is covenantally a husband, and whether or not he is …
Theological Spam
My spam filter catches hundreds of invitations a day — invitations to check out these mortgage rates, these crazy chicks, these unbelievable cell phone offers, and more. One nagging question concerns why these companies go to all this effort. Does anybody actually get their mortgage this way? And the answer has to be yes. Otherwise, …
The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth
In Not Reformed At All, at the bottom on page 29, Robbins/Gerety breathlessly announce that I have denied the very concept of truth. They put it this way. “In 1999 Wilson published an essay titled “The Great Logic Fraud” in his book The Paideia of God. It expresses his revolt against excellence, precision, and logic. …
Reformed Just A Skosh
From time to time, I want to make a few comments on passages of the Robbins/Gerety Not Reformed At All book. The passages generally have this in common — they are marked with exclamation marks in the margins, sometimes more than one, in my personal copy of this book. I will not be yelling at …