Most sports fans have now heard that Eddie Sutton, long-time coach of the Oklahoma State basketball team, was charged with a DUI. He has admitted to having a drinking problem in the past but nonetheless I think society is still shocked by the idea of a college basketball coach, a role-model for young men, the main advisor for these young athletes as they seek their education, and a representative of the school. We could easily just say that he should be fired from the school as a standard policy for any staff or faculty who violate the substance abuse policy. I think we often take this rigid approach in churches and Christian schools. Why do we do this? Maybe tradition, maybe we think that kind of influence is infection, maybe by sticking to a strict policy we discourage others from that kind of behavior in the future. Maybe all of those are true, and all those are very “good” reasons.
But I think the reason we do this is more likely that we have come to value institutions over people. This began to come up in a conversation I had with friends (you know who you are) about discipline at a Christian school over the weekend. Given school is more important than given student. Given church is more important than given member. This is the rule and not the exception. In the case of Eddie Sutton, I am surprised by the response of Oklahoma State. In an age where any minor scandal is enough to make college presidents, school principals, and church pastors worry about support, financial and otherwise from boosters, parents, and members respectively, Oklahoma State has stepped up and done the right thing. They mention nothing about their tarnished image, their decreased recruiting ability, and possibly millions of dollars in booster revenue but rather the president of the school says things like the following:
“Schmidly [the school president] said the university will support Eddie Sutton. ‘We want him to get well, get back on his feet and we will look forward to the time when he will return and continue his contribution to our university,’ Schmidly said. Schmidly said Wednesday's announcement didn't necessarily mean Sutton would be retiring, but the president said he wouldn't be surprised if that happened. "If anybody has seen this man, (they) know what kind of pain he's in,’ Schmidly said. ‘He's 69 years old. We've got to get Coach to focus on his health. That's the most important thing.’
The president of OSU had the opportunity to show students and supporters the consequences of drunken driving. Instead, he taught them a far greater lesson, that of redemption. Just as man was not made for the sabbath, but the sabbath for man, so the institution was made for man’s sake, not the other way around. What if our church pastors, Christian school principals, and other Christian leaders spoke like Mr. Schmidly in regards to discipline? How would our children turn out? What would be their understanding of redemption and most importantly their understanding of Jesus?
Read the article at ESPN: Click Here
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
#24 Charles Darwin & John Calvin
Just like many biblical scholars will claim that Paul was misunderstood or perhaps taken too far, and just like I am suspecting that John Calvin has been misunderstood and taken too far, is it possible that Charles Darwin was misunderstood and taken too far? In the same way that people fail to understand Paul because they don’t try to understand what he was saying but only “what it means to them in the 21st century,” I think it’s possible that we do the same thing with John Calvin. After all, some of the most vocal critics of what these critics themselves have labeled ‘Darwinism’ do not even consider it worth reading to find out. Instead they take the few words they have heard from the religious establishment, the news media, an encyclopedia entry, and other secondary sources and perhaps create a battle that never needed to be created in the first place, a battle that Darwin never considered the point at issue in the first place.
I think it is clear that many have done that with Paul; maybe even John Calvin did that, but maybe not. Certainly, many today do that with Calvin. How many Presbyterians do you know that have actually read his Institutes? Yet, he comes up in every sermon, every book, and every college lecture regarding theology (I went to a Presbyterian {PCA} college). He is the figurehead of the Presbyterian church. It’s leading man they look up to. And yet, no one has read him. Is it possible that the beliefs ascribed to him were never implied by him in the words he actually spoke. We all know it’s been done with Paul.
So with that in mind Institutes is next on my reading list. Why? Election. This ties in to my post #21 Witherington on Sovereignty. This is kind of the hot topic for young Christians. It seems to be the holy grail of theological debates in Christianity. I’ve spent countless hours discussing the subject with friends, family members, etc. I can’t completely reconcile the ‘Presbyterian’ (and as you could have guessed from the first couple of paragraphs, I’m not going use the word ‘Calvinistic’) view with the scope of the Bible as a whole. But what I’m thinking is that maybe it’s possible to reconcile Calvin’s actual teaching with the Bible as a whole. And I guess the scary thought for the modern church is that this might be because Calvin’s actual teaching on the one hand and ‘Calvinism’ as passed down to the lay people, the Sunday school students, the college students and the fair-weather fans of knowing God on the other hand do not themselves reconcile.
As far as Darwin is concerned, the idea came from a reading of a Newsweek article at the following link: Click Here. Here’s a quote: “Darwin introduced the notion of evolution: that the lineages of living things change, diverge and go extinct over time, rather than appear suddenly in immutable form, as Genesis would have it.” Who can disagree with the first half of his statement? Living things do change to adapt to their surroundings. This has been seen in animals as well as people groups. The word diverge is a little more shaky but comes from this idea of adaptability. As far as the last half of the statement goes, the only disagreement is that I believe the sudden appearance happened once. But from there, once we get past that point, Darwin’s view, as abstracted in that quote, is agreeable. So creation vs. big bang seems like a separate debate than evolution vs. whatever it is up against.
For a moment, let’s set the creation debate aside, and assume we have all decided that God created the world in seven days. Now, let’s talk about evolution. Let’s talk about it as a natural scientific progress that theoretically takes place. I see no room for creation in this debate. It is not creation vs. evolution so much as like I said creation vs. big bang and evolution vs. a static view of nature. I think that once we frame it in those terms, this “static view of nature” doesn’t sound so biblical and evolution doesn’t sound so anti-God. It’s when we mix up the debates that things get out of hand, and unnecessarily so. To play my view out in practice would be to believe that creation and evolution can actually both be true with one being it’s first cause and the other being a natural scientific process that continually occurs akin to gravity, clouds forming in the sky, and the immune system fighting disease. Even the Newsweek article mixes the debates up in what I think is a poor understanding of Darwin’s theory.
Back to the article, it has a good explanation of his thought process and believe me, his view and framework for how the process works is a lot more robust than the classic caricature of the ape growing into a man in stages would have you believe. But since this article is a further abstraction from what perhaps Darwin originally intended, I have added his writings to my reading list in keeping with the principles I stated earlier in this post.
Then the article comes to a key point which I think a lot of anti-evolution types miss. “His crucial insight was that organisms which by chance are better adapted to their environment—a faster wolf—have a better chance of surviving and passing those characteristics on to the next generation.” Pretend for a second you didn’t hear that from Darwin. That sentence is, like the other one, completely agreeable. He called this process “natural selection.” It results in what is called a “survival of the fittest.” That’s when it hit me that maybe the way we in the church have been understanding Darwin, or what we call ‘Darwinism’ was not how Darwin originally intended it to be.
You see I grew up with the understanding that in evolution we would actually go through a process of changing within ourselves during our lifetime, though it happens so slowly you would never notice it. On the contrary, this sentence seems to suggest that change never actually takes place within an individual being, human or animal, during their lifetime. In short, Darwin seems to be saying that evolution as I have understood it doesn’t happen, i.e. genes do not modify slowly within us. Instead genes are fixed at birth and the only way that species actually change is over time. In other words, individuals never evolve, they just die out and their offspring with a fixed set of genes that is slightly different replaces them.
Maybe it’ll be most clear with the wolf example from above. It’s not that the fast wolf actually changed from being slow to fast over it’s lifetime in order to become a better hunter so it could survive and then its offspring took this and evolved itself and so on. Rather, the original wolf was born with, or dare I say created with, these characteristics. Other wolves were born slower. During famine, the fast wolves remained alive due their quickness in catching food and were able to produce more offspring. These offspring retained the characteristic of being fast much like we often look like our fathers and mothers and have other characteristics of them, while the fewer number of slow wolves caught less food and produced even less offspring. This process repeated itself and left us with the wolves we have today, which we call fast. But isn’t it entirely possible, based on the evidence we do have for evolution, that the majority of original wolves were as slow as turtles, and that the minority was able to survive better because of speed and thus were able to produce more offspring and are thus all we see today? You see in this example, the individual fast wolves never actually changed within themselves, they just passed on what they had received at birth.
That is perhaps the original definition of evolution: not a genetic change per se, but rather a dying out of the old and a replacement with the new. That is what Darwin calls “natural selection.” The definition that I’m proposing is subtle but I think it key to refocusing and perhaps ending the debate. Let’s agree that creation happened in the past, let’s agree that evolution occurs in the present, and let’s debate instead about the mechanism of that evolution. Is it a change going on within each individual or is it a changed that is passed down by birth? But first of all, since we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, i.e. Darwin has already done a lot of thinking for us, let’s read Darwin himself to see what he had to say.
I think it is clear that many have done that with Paul; maybe even John Calvin did that, but maybe not. Certainly, many today do that with Calvin. How many Presbyterians do you know that have actually read his Institutes? Yet, he comes up in every sermon, every book, and every college lecture regarding theology (I went to a Presbyterian {PCA} college). He is the figurehead of the Presbyterian church. It’s leading man they look up to. And yet, no one has read him. Is it possible that the beliefs ascribed to him were never implied by him in the words he actually spoke. We all know it’s been done with Paul.
So with that in mind Institutes is next on my reading list. Why? Election. This ties in to my post #21 Witherington on Sovereignty. This is kind of the hot topic for young Christians. It seems to be the holy grail of theological debates in Christianity. I’ve spent countless hours discussing the subject with friends, family members, etc. I can’t completely reconcile the ‘Presbyterian’ (and as you could have guessed from the first couple of paragraphs, I’m not going use the word ‘Calvinistic’) view with the scope of the Bible as a whole. But what I’m thinking is that maybe it’s possible to reconcile Calvin’s actual teaching with the Bible as a whole. And I guess the scary thought for the modern church is that this might be because Calvin’s actual teaching on the one hand and ‘Calvinism’ as passed down to the lay people, the Sunday school students, the college students and the fair-weather fans of knowing God on the other hand do not themselves reconcile.
As far as Darwin is concerned, the idea came from a reading of a Newsweek article at the following link: Click Here. Here’s a quote: “Darwin introduced the notion of evolution: that the lineages of living things change, diverge and go extinct over time, rather than appear suddenly in immutable form, as Genesis would have it.” Who can disagree with the first half of his statement? Living things do change to adapt to their surroundings. This has been seen in animals as well as people groups. The word diverge is a little more shaky but comes from this idea of adaptability. As far as the last half of the statement goes, the only disagreement is that I believe the sudden appearance happened once. But from there, once we get past that point, Darwin’s view, as abstracted in that quote, is agreeable. So creation vs. big bang seems like a separate debate than evolution vs. whatever it is up against.
For a moment, let’s set the creation debate aside, and assume we have all decided that God created the world in seven days. Now, let’s talk about evolution. Let’s talk about it as a natural scientific progress that theoretically takes place. I see no room for creation in this debate. It is not creation vs. evolution so much as like I said creation vs. big bang and evolution vs. a static view of nature. I think that once we frame it in those terms, this “static view of nature” doesn’t sound so biblical and evolution doesn’t sound so anti-God. It’s when we mix up the debates that things get out of hand, and unnecessarily so. To play my view out in practice would be to believe that creation and evolution can actually both be true with one being it’s first cause and the other being a natural scientific process that continually occurs akin to gravity, clouds forming in the sky, and the immune system fighting disease. Even the Newsweek article mixes the debates up in what I think is a poor understanding of Darwin’s theory.
Back to the article, it has a good explanation of his thought process and believe me, his view and framework for how the process works is a lot more robust than the classic caricature of the ape growing into a man in stages would have you believe. But since this article is a further abstraction from what perhaps Darwin originally intended, I have added his writings to my reading list in keeping with the principles I stated earlier in this post.
Then the article comes to a key point which I think a lot of anti-evolution types miss. “His crucial insight was that organisms which by chance are better adapted to their environment—a faster wolf—have a better chance of surviving and passing those characteristics on to the next generation.” Pretend for a second you didn’t hear that from Darwin. That sentence is, like the other one, completely agreeable. He called this process “natural selection.” It results in what is called a “survival of the fittest.” That’s when it hit me that maybe the way we in the church have been understanding Darwin, or what we call ‘Darwinism’ was not how Darwin originally intended it to be.
You see I grew up with the understanding that in evolution we would actually go through a process of changing within ourselves during our lifetime, though it happens so slowly you would never notice it. On the contrary, this sentence seems to suggest that change never actually takes place within an individual being, human or animal, during their lifetime. In short, Darwin seems to be saying that evolution as I have understood it doesn’t happen, i.e. genes do not modify slowly within us. Instead genes are fixed at birth and the only way that species actually change is over time. In other words, individuals never evolve, they just die out and their offspring with a fixed set of genes that is slightly different replaces them.
Maybe it’ll be most clear with the wolf example from above. It’s not that the fast wolf actually changed from being slow to fast over it’s lifetime in order to become a better hunter so it could survive and then its offspring took this and evolved itself and so on. Rather, the original wolf was born with, or dare I say created with, these characteristics. Other wolves were born slower. During famine, the fast wolves remained alive due their quickness in catching food and were able to produce more offspring. These offspring retained the characteristic of being fast much like we often look like our fathers and mothers and have other characteristics of them, while the fewer number of slow wolves caught less food and produced even less offspring. This process repeated itself and left us with the wolves we have today, which we call fast. But isn’t it entirely possible, based on the evidence we do have for evolution, that the majority of original wolves were as slow as turtles, and that the minority was able to survive better because of speed and thus were able to produce more offspring and are thus all we see today? You see in this example, the individual fast wolves never actually changed within themselves, they just passed on what they had received at birth.
That is perhaps the original definition of evolution: not a genetic change per se, but rather a dying out of the old and a replacement with the new. That is what Darwin calls “natural selection.” The definition that I’m proposing is subtle but I think it key to refocusing and perhaps ending the debate. Let’s agree that creation happened in the past, let’s agree that evolution occurs in the present, and let’s debate instead about the mechanism of that evolution. Is it a change going on within each individual or is it a changed that is passed down by birth? But first of all, since we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, i.e. Darwin has already done a lot of thinking for us, let’s read Darwin himself to see what he had to say.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
#23 The Resurrection of the Son of God
I just finally finished N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God after two almost two month of reading. That was dense. As dense as it was, he is repetitive in all of his books; he has certain themes that he likes to emphasize. I’m not going to write a review of the book because there is way too much to say. It is a must read though, at least in my opinion, as were the first two in the series. And I can’t wait for the next installment, which I just found out a little something about at the end of RSG. He mentions the phrase ‘justification by faith’, a topic which, though he is perhaps most famous for his views of Paul’s views on the subject, he has yet to deal with it or even, as far as I can remember, mention it so far in the series. He follows that mention up by saying that a discussion of it will have to wait until the next volume. So I’m guessing his next volume is about Paul. Going by this hint and the pattern so far, the next book will probably be called Paul and the “____” of God. Hopefully we’ll find out sooner rather than later what that mystery word to fill in the blank is.
Anyway, for now you can find a good review of Jesus and the Victory of God at the following link. Click Here As great as those three books were, it will be nice to get onto some other quicker reads, if nothing else, for a change of pace.
Anyway, for now you can find a good review of Jesus and the Victory of God at the following link. Click Here As great as those three books were, it will be nice to get onto some other quicker reads, if nothing else, for a change of pace.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
#22 The Beatles Influence
Here’s a little tidbit to break the monotony. This is a great article I found about the Beatles on a website for a magazine called Commentary Magazine. Everybody always talks about how influential and great they were but as much as I love there music, I have a hard time understand this influence because I simply wasn’t there. The article is pretty short but talks a little bit about the music, how it evolved and of course a bit about the influence as well. Click Here to read the article.
Friday, February 10, 2006
#21 Witherington on Sovereignty
By now, most everybody has heard about Pat Robertson’s declaration that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Here is the quote from the CNN.com article: "He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club." "God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone,'" he said.
I’m reminded of this because at our weekly Bible study this week, in which we are reading through J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, we started off on the subject of prayer, and moved on to what is, in my mind at least, a related, though less overtly biblical subject, that is: how much of what happens is planned by God? Is it every minute detail or only salvation; the fact that I chose to change the channel on the television, or only important encounters leading to knowing God better? Is every move we make scripted according to the will of God? That is the question asked and maybe it’s obvious how this conflicts with the idea of prayer, at least in my mind.
These thoughts reminded me of a great post on Ben Witherington’s blog post on Hurricane Katrina which is a great examination of the issue in question, both Pat Robertson’s comments and our discussion about the will of God. The entire purpose of my post here is to get you to read his post here: Click Here. The questions I’d like to come back to at some point soon in my writing are these: What kind of story does the Bible tell regarding whether prayer actually causes God to consider a different path? That question leads me to wonder whether God’s plan is so inflexible that nothing can be or has been changed since he first devised it, or whether the opposite is true, that God’s ultimate plan is so perfect that no matter what little changes are made to the details of the plan through the granting of [prayer] requests brought before God?
The first is a very biblical question, the second a theological question. This final question brings the two together. When Paul spoke of the sovereignty of God, what did he have in mind? Witherington critiques the view that I grew up with in this quote from his response to a comment on his blog, “...it is a huge mistake to equate God's sovereignty with causation when it comes to a whole host of events. The issue is not whether God is almighty, but rather how does God exercise his sovereignty. The problem with John Piper and other scholars who read the Bible as if it were written by Augustine or Calvin rather than by early Jews, is that they do not understand how early Jews thought about these subjects, which... involves allowing there to be more than one source of causation in the universe. It is equally problematic to make God's sovereignty the heremeneutical key by which then one tries to fit God's other attributes into a procrustean bed.”
The last sentence, I think, gets to the heart of the issue we began to discuss at the Bible study the other night, and the issue I discuss elsewhere in post #5, From Exegesis to Theology. To know about God before knowing God (to use J.I. Packer’s distinction) is to go in the opposite direction, from theology to exegesis. Because we have decided on holding firmly to the doctrine of sovereignty in advance, we fail to exegete and thus understand the great sweep of the story of God’s people which deals with prayer. My hunch is that we have misunderstood Paul on the issue of sovereignty. What I am saying isn’t in any way revolutionary. Witherington seems to be saying this while N.T. Wright is partly as famous as he is for his view that we have misunderstood Paul on the doctrine of justification.
I believe we might have taken one word, sovereignty, too far as we sat in the stratosphere of theology and are now trying to force it back down to earth with mixed results, hence the “procrustean bed” allusion. I believe it is forcing other doctrines, such as that of the effect of prayer, onto the backburner as it becomes the primary doctrine to which all others must bow. In the church I grew up in and currently identify myself with (PCA/Reformed) it is the chief doctrine, the standard by which all others are judged by, and the lense through which the rest are viewed. It is the god of the doctrines, the taskmaster who will crack his whip if any others get out of line. To use reformation language, to me it looks like the sixth sola, “sola sovereignty.” To find out if my hunch is correct, I’ve got to look into two things: 1. What the people of God believed about prayer and 2. What Paul did and did not mean when he described the sovereignty of God.
I’m reminded of this because at our weekly Bible study this week, in which we are reading through J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, we started off on the subject of prayer, and moved on to what is, in my mind at least, a related, though less overtly biblical subject, that is: how much of what happens is planned by God? Is it every minute detail or only salvation; the fact that I chose to change the channel on the television, or only important encounters leading to knowing God better? Is every move we make scripted according to the will of God? That is the question asked and maybe it’s obvious how this conflicts with the idea of prayer, at least in my mind.
These thoughts reminded me of a great post on Ben Witherington’s blog post on Hurricane Katrina which is a great examination of the issue in question, both Pat Robertson’s comments and our discussion about the will of God. The entire purpose of my post here is to get you to read his post here: Click Here. The questions I’d like to come back to at some point soon in my writing are these: What kind of story does the Bible tell regarding whether prayer actually causes God to consider a different path? That question leads me to wonder whether God’s plan is so inflexible that nothing can be or has been changed since he first devised it, or whether the opposite is true, that God’s ultimate plan is so perfect that no matter what little changes are made to the details of the plan through the granting of [prayer] requests brought before God?
The first is a very biblical question, the second a theological question. This final question brings the two together. When Paul spoke of the sovereignty of God, what did he have in mind? Witherington critiques the view that I grew up with in this quote from his response to a comment on his blog, “...it is a huge mistake to equate God's sovereignty with causation when it comes to a whole host of events. The issue is not whether God is almighty, but rather how does God exercise his sovereignty. The problem with John Piper and other scholars who read the Bible as if it were written by Augustine or Calvin rather than by early Jews, is that they do not understand how early Jews thought about these subjects, which... involves allowing there to be more than one source of causation in the universe. It is equally problematic to make God's sovereignty the heremeneutical key by which then one tries to fit God's other attributes into a procrustean bed.”
The last sentence, I think, gets to the heart of the issue we began to discuss at the Bible study the other night, and the issue I discuss elsewhere in post #5, From Exegesis to Theology. To know about God before knowing God (to use J.I. Packer’s distinction) is to go in the opposite direction, from theology to exegesis. Because we have decided on holding firmly to the doctrine of sovereignty in advance, we fail to exegete and thus understand the great sweep of the story of God’s people which deals with prayer. My hunch is that we have misunderstood Paul on the issue of sovereignty. What I am saying isn’t in any way revolutionary. Witherington seems to be saying this while N.T. Wright is partly as famous as he is for his view that we have misunderstood Paul on the doctrine of justification.
I believe we might have taken one word, sovereignty, too far as we sat in the stratosphere of theology and are now trying to force it back down to earth with mixed results, hence the “procrustean bed” allusion. I believe it is forcing other doctrines, such as that of the effect of prayer, onto the backburner as it becomes the primary doctrine to which all others must bow. In the church I grew up in and currently identify myself with (PCA/Reformed) it is the chief doctrine, the standard by which all others are judged by, and the lense through which the rest are viewed. It is the god of the doctrines, the taskmaster who will crack his whip if any others get out of line. To use reformation language, to me it looks like the sixth sola, “sola sovereignty.” To find out if my hunch is correct, I’ve got to look into two things: 1. What the people of God believed about prayer and 2. What Paul did and did not mean when he described the sovereignty of God.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
#20 First Thoughts on N.T. Wright and J.I. Packer
Today I will begin to get back to purpose and structure in my writing. Where I last left off, I was going through The New Testament & The People of God and writing my thoughts on what I had underlined when I read it. It is definitely the toughest to get through of the three volumes he has published so far but a necessary preface to the other two. Although it’s hard to give a broad overview of what Wright’s project is trying to accomplish, the opening part of the book especially and perhaps even the whole book is about how to do history, specifically as it relates to Jesus and the early church with the obvious application of how to read the Bible. Certainly, it’s a better analysis than any I’ve ever heard. And as I’ve written before, I’ve been submersed in Evangelical Christianity my entire life.
Though there’s a lot in there to comment on, I will pick what to me are the choicest morsels to write about. The next of these (I’ve written about a couple) is found on page 60 of NTPG. There is so much quality material that I will probably be quoting a lot. If N.T. Wright or publishers have a problem with the extensive quotation please let me know and I will remove it. I, for one, hope that it will serve to inspire people to pick up your book. The quote, from p. 60, is below:
“The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models. Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously – often, in fact, there above all – there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels.”
I felt like we touched on this topic a little bit tonight, in an indirect way, in our inaugural Bible study in which we are reading J.I. Packer’s Knowing God. The discussion came out of J.I. Packer discussing five basic assumptions that are the foundation for his book. My thought is that to the “church [that] has lived with the gospels virtually all its life”, indeed, these are taken to be basic truths, truths which by the way, I agree with.
These five truths (chapter 1 in Knowing God) are the foundation for a systematic theology. I’ve likened the practice of using a systematic theology as a basic foundation to going the wrong way down a one way street in an earlier post. I think that is what we do when we assume too much. We push our preconceived notions down onto the Bible and force God into a box. Along with this hermeneutical method often goes a reading “which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelist, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like (Wright, p. 60).” I think this is a fantastic analysis of the current situation in the church. And don’t worry, he follows up by saying that this god must be gracious because a word from him has been heard despite “the awful muddle that readers and interpreters have gotten themselves into.”
Despite that sticking point for me in Packer’s book, which is not so much a disagreement in principle as a disagreement in emphasis, there were so many great ideas that Packer has brought up in just the first short chapter that I look forward to writing about our points of agreement, which are far greater in number than our points of disagreement, in the future. It just so happens that my thoughts on Wright and my thoughts on Packer happened to collide tonight. As far as Wright is concerned, I am skipping so much of what he has to say in my writing because his writing is so dense that if I were to comment on every idea he brings forward, I would never get through the first chapter. Nonetheless, I’m glad to be back on the trail.
Though there’s a lot in there to comment on, I will pick what to me are the choicest morsels to write about. The next of these (I’ve written about a couple) is found on page 60 of NTPG. There is so much quality material that I will probably be quoting a lot. If N.T. Wright or publishers have a problem with the extensive quotation please let me know and I will remove it. I, for one, hope that it will serve to inspire people to pick up your book. The quote, from p. 60, is below:
“The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models. Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously – often, in fact, there above all – there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels.”
I felt like we touched on this topic a little bit tonight, in an indirect way, in our inaugural Bible study in which we are reading J.I. Packer’s Knowing God. The discussion came out of J.I. Packer discussing five basic assumptions that are the foundation for his book. My thought is that to the “church [that] has lived with the gospels virtually all its life”, indeed, these are taken to be basic truths, truths which by the way, I agree with.
These five truths (chapter 1 in Knowing God) are the foundation for a systematic theology. I’ve likened the practice of using a systematic theology as a basic foundation to going the wrong way down a one way street in an earlier post. I think that is what we do when we assume too much. We push our preconceived notions down onto the Bible and force God into a box. Along with this hermeneutical method often goes a reading “which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelist, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like (Wright, p. 60).” I think this is a fantastic analysis of the current situation in the church. And don’t worry, he follows up by saying that this god must be gracious because a word from him has been heard despite “the awful muddle that readers and interpreters have gotten themselves into.”
Despite that sticking point for me in Packer’s book, which is not so much a disagreement in principle as a disagreement in emphasis, there were so many great ideas that Packer has brought up in just the first short chapter that I look forward to writing about our points of agreement, which are far greater in number than our points of disagreement, in the future. It just so happens that my thoughts on Wright and my thoughts on Packer happened to collide tonight. As far as Wright is concerned, I am skipping so much of what he has to say in my writing because his writing is so dense that if I were to comment on every idea he brings forward, I would never get through the first chapter. Nonetheless, I’m glad to be back on the trail.
#19 Carolina Panthers Cheerleaders
Periodically I’m going to regress from my journalistic endeavors to bring exciting news stories, links, and other factoids that I find interesting. This post is one fine example. By now, everybody has heard the story of the Carolina Panther cheerleaders caught, in the words of Atlanta Braves’ center fielder Andruw Jones, “doing lesbian action.” Below is the link to the police report, just released today, from The Smoking Gun website. Without further adieu and purely for your entertainment...
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