“Now wait. They lost us again. Are we to have a total war against totalizing readings? All of them? But when we do, are we not guilty of totalizing against totalizing? No wait . . . this is an additional subtlety perhaps? What better way to inveigh against totalizing than to totalize against it, thus …
A Pop Fly
“You know, this is really good. Don’t you just love it when gifted Bible expositors show you things in Scripture that you never saw there before? Some of us would never have thought that the embrace of marginality, to take just one example, could even have a trajectory. One hardly knows how to think about …
The Great Protection of Having No Roof
“The authors took the risk when they wrote this book that some bonehead readers (like the present reviewer) might be stone cold deaf to some of their nuances. You see, the Bible works against totalization and one of the reasons is that God has an overarching creational intent. Now how God can overarch something like …
Convergence
“Of course in the postevangelical world, when something is problematic, it is not necessary to solve the problem or answer the question. All that is necessary is to wrestle with the contours of it. Nevertheless, as listeners to the biblical story, our authors want us to consider doing the same. After all, if we listen …
A New Imperialism
“But actually, in the postmodern milieu, awareness doesn’t grow and nothing discloses anything–except for an occasional contour. Old patterns are hard to break, and we urge our authors to redouble their efforts at their sanctification. When they tell us to lay off the violence, I detect the contours of a new imperialism. Why are they …
Entropy
“Bygone trendiness is simply not good enough for the scholarship of current trendiness. This is a constant problem; trendiness never stays put, and what’s cool usually assumes room temperature at some point” (Contours of Post Maturity, pp. 10-11).
What “Is” Truth?
“So let’s start our book review ruminations by pointing out that when we start putting “truth” in quotation marks, we must start with the truth that “truth” must be in quotation marks. And where does that leave us? Not only do we have ever-increasing punctuation problems and hard, pointed questions from our tech proofers, we …
Just Asking For It
“They [IVP] published Truth is Stranger Than It Used To Be, The Openness of God, and Christian Apologetics in a Postmodern World, all books which invite warm and enthusiastic invective in the full-throated Johannine tradition. All three books exhibit exegetical skylarking in excelsis. So why not have at it? And let me just say for …
Nations Raised
“As the gospel makes its way through a treacherous world, we have seen the righteous fall many times, and before the Lord comes again, we will see them fall again. But whenever the righteous fall, those who lament must be sons of Abraham. They must serve the God who calls those things that do not …
Root and Fruit
“Our problems are spiritual, and the solutions are the Word and sacraments. The charge was not “go ye, and elect right-of-center congresspersons.” Now certainly the gospel has an effect on all of culture, as it should. But results are not causes; apples are not roots” (Angels in the Architecture, p. 203).