This secular age has an unholy trinity, an attempt to counterfeit the place that the triune God holds in the world as it actually is. This, to be distinguished from the world that these bunglers are trying to fashion right in front of us. Their father wants power, their son wants to be the incarnation …
His Supreme Whiteness Up on the Mountain
Franke says, at the beginning of his next chapter, that the emphasis on otherness “that is related to the triune nature of God is also a particularly promising aspect of postmodern thought” (p. 91). Howzzat? Well, as it turns out, the triune nature of God appears to provide a firm foundation for leftist bromides about …
Speaking of Cotton Balls . . .
Chapter 9 of Franke’s book is on “Scripture as Manifold Witness. This is where all the problems with this kind of thinking start to converge. Makes me think of the time the apostle Paul and I visited the town of Pomo, just south of Lystra, and after the inhabitants gathered the totalizing import of Paul’s …
Maneuvering Room
The next chapter in Franke’s book is Chapter 8, “Scripture As the Word of God.” And technically, everything should be okay, because the words are all okay, but everything is so darn parsed, and I think I recognize maneuvering room when I see it. “The historic commitment of the church to the idea that Scripture …
The Free Safety of Orthodoxy Considered as a Tub of Pudge
Chapter 7 of Franke’s book is where an astute defensive coordinator starts to get a good idea where the wide receiver is going to run his route. But since our free safety of orthodoxy has spent way too much time at KFC and is a tub of pudge, it begins to look as though we …
Sold Down the River
This post on chapter five of Franke’s book will be a little, short one. That is because this chapter was unexceptional in itself, and said many good, wholesome things. It was on “Jesus, Truth, and the Trinity,” and said many things familiar to every orthodox Christian — ultimate truth is a Person (p. 43), truth …
Like He Was David Copperfield
Like virtually all evangelicals trying to go with the zeitgeist flow, John Franke has to do some foot dragging here and there. He has to throw in a few sturdy absolutes from time to time, and this puts some believers at their ease. “The Spirit is guiding the community of faith into the truth, purposes, …
Unity and Uniformity
This post on the next chapter of Franke’s book will not be all that long. He says a number of true (and obvious) things about the diversity that has existed in the Christian church over the centuries, and which will no doubt continue to exist. He then points to the indigenization principle (God takes us …
In the Mouths of Theological Blowhards
In his second chapter, John Franke says a number of reassuring things, that would have been just fine in another setting. But here, they are not. For example and to wit: “An understanding of the situated and contextual character of truth and Christian theology provides a theological framework from which to embrace Christian pluralism without …
The Plurality of Truth Moonwalk
John Franke begins by asking and answering the question, “Do you believe in truth?” He allows that the easiest thing for emergents to do is to just say yes, in order to reassure everybody. But then he gets into his explanation of why he thinks this is an odd question, and all the reasons why …