Prodigal Thought chides me and a few other complementards for missing the main point of N.T. Wright’s piece on women’s ordination, which was the fact that the resurrection was absolutely transformative when it comes to issues like Jew/Gentile, slave/free, or male and female. The issues about Mary Magdalene, Junia, and Phoebe were side issues. What …
Serious Scholars Clown Car Review
In the previous post, I took N.T. Wright to task for trifling with the text of 1 Tim. 2:12, and for insulting our intelligence. A discussion broke out in the comments about whether I had been too cavalier and dismissive of Wright. So here’s a little something about all that. In the first place, I …
Fresh Butter at Ephesus
The other day, when I responded to N.T. Wright’s foray into extreme Pauline makeovers, a friend sent me a link to a longer and more scholarly defense of Wright’s posish. That link I now pass on to you. And being a good Christian, and a fair-minded soul, I read it. All the way to the …
Squeezing Harder Than That
The Church of England just recently said no to women bishops. There were howls of outrage from all the predictable quarters, for whom such a troglodyte move is just smack-the-forehead baffling. Now I can understand a vote against women bishops as a preliminary move to try to undo the ordination of women priests. And I …
Jesus and Conservatism
Everyone must stand somewhere in order to say anything. And even if what he wants to say is that the previous sentence is not true, he still has to stand somewhere to say it. We can run, but we can’t hide. If one of the things I want to say (or confess) is that Jesus …
Not to Mention Unsightly Splotches
This weekend I had occasion to browse the theolgy section of a bookstore, and picked up Spong’s The Sins of Scripture. The funnest part of that experience was reading the blurb for it on the back cover from Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News fame, which seemed to me to be just about right. Inside, Spong …
Second Temple Piracy
N.T. Wright takes the famous “den of robbers” statement made by Jesus in the cleansing of the Temple as referring to revolutionaries, which the word lestes can mean. But Peter Leithart, citing Nicholas Perrin, takes it in the more straightforward sense of “thieves.” Here are a couple reasons why Leithart’s reading is much to be …
The TSA of the Reformed World
Justin Taylor posts a helpful summary by Andrew Cowan of the N.T. Wright word-flurry at ETS this year. You can read about that here. This seems a quite reasonable summary to me, and it means that Wright is not a stalking horse for some kind of Romanist self-righteousness. But this means, in its turn, that …
A Really Little Cabinet
Burk Parsons is the editor of Tabletalk, and he wrote a very brief introduction explaining why the magazine was tackling the subject of N.T. Wright at all. In that intro, he included a quote from John Piper designed to put all the critical assessment in context. That comment is worth quoting in full. “Nicholas Thomas …
Mathison Channels Newton
Keith Mathison contributed the next article for Tabletalk, and it was a pippin. The article is basically a reprise of John Newton’s great letter to a friend “On Controversy.” Assuming the truth of your position, and your ability to win the argument, there are still other considerations. As my father puts it, there is a …