This post originally ran May 10, 2010. 1. Truth is objective, ultimate, absolute, personal, alive, and triune. 2. Because of this ultimate reality, it is possible for creatures who were fashioned by this living God to know Him as the personal and ultimate truth, as well as to know lesser truths in the created world …
Explaining the Rooster
I am happy to continue my discussion of what certainty means with Micah Neely. There is a lot of fundamental agreement here, but I believe a crucial application of this agreement has gone missing. I entirely agree that when it comes to truth metaphor is all that is, that it is metaphor “all the way …
How God Hooked Us Up
So here below is a friendly rejoinder to a response to my recent jab at hermeneutical humility. My thanks to Micah Neely for the interaction. The nuances here may seem exquisite to some and very fine, but I actually think a great deal rides on it. It is le big deal, as the French put …
Hard Teeth
A friend recently sent me a quote from J.B. Skemp, writing about the liberal scholarship of the late 19th century. Skemp says: “The excessive attention to patterns and typology is in part due to a fear of reasoned and systematic doctrinal teaching, which is thought to depend too much on an alien Greek wisdom simply …
Cooking and Counting
One of the charges that is laid at my feet with some regularity is that I am an autodidact, unaccountable to no one, and that this unfortunate fact makes me pop off from time to time, and to do so in ways that are clean contrary to what is taught by the certified experts and …
Page After Page of It
I have earlier made note of what are called plausibility structures. They explain why it is easy to be a Mormon in Salt Lake City, a Muslim in Mecca, and a secularist in an MSNBC newsroom. But let us refrain from applying it to first order beliefs, like religion, and fifth order beliefs, like the …
In Which We Discover Why Is Is Is
We believe in the God who reveals Himself to us, and not in a God who lies to us. He does not reveal Himself to us exhaustively, for that would crush us, but He reveals Himself to us in truth. But in order for God to reveal Himself to us in truth, we must have …
Reservoir of Relativism
A web discussion I was just in made me think of a few follow-up observations on my post of a week or two ago when I was discussing “logic” as a necessary attribute of God. Lewis says somewhere that courage is not so much a separate virtue as it is the testing point of all …
The Ultimacy of Right Reason
I want to expand a bit on what I said about logic and the character and nature of God. First, the problem. If logic is external to God, and is something that He obeys or conforms to, then we are saying that there is another God, senior to Him, whose dictates He must somehow obey. …
What the Goblins Under the Mountain Call It
Yeats notwithstanding, we are not exactly slouching toward Bethlehem. Slouching toward Bedlam is more like it. As the culture around us has gotten ever weirder, and as the leadership of our Reformed and evangelical subculture has done its level best to keep abreast of all the latest advances (lest we be dismissed for being what …