Ad`ver`sa´ri`a
n. pl.
A miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections.-
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Jeff Meyers on AAPC/FV/NPP Part 5
Posted in Controversies, The Blogosphere, Theological
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Home Again
I arrived home this morning at about 3:00AM for reading week. I had expected to arrive at 10:00PM, but there had been a derailment between Preston and Lancaster, which led to a whole series of hold-ups. Just about everything seemed to go wrong and, instead of taking five hours, my journey took ten hours. God was good and I actually quite enjoyed the journey, despite all of the hassle. I was able to get some good reading, Bible study and even some Hebrew revision done on the train. Arriving back I found out that some kind person had bought me Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value and Eco’s Serendipities from my Amazon wishlist. That really made my day.
It has been encouraging to be back with my family again and to hear how God has blessed each one of us in so many different ways. I am a bit tired today, but it has been great to catch up with my brothers. We spent the last hour or so working on the allotment, which was good fun. This evening we are planning to have a bonfire, to which the members of our church have been invited.
I don’t expect that I will be posting much over the next week. I do not have the same ease of access to a computer and I want to focus on some reading. I plan, among other things, to read Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite from cover to cover, which should be a challenge. I started it a while back, but got distracted by other things. I thought that reading week would give a good opportunity to do this.
Posted in What I'm Doing
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What are the ‘Works of the Law’?
I have been asked to elaborate a bit on my understanding of the connection between the ‘ceremonial’ aspects of the Law and death and sin. Rather than merely doing so in the comments of the post that led to the question, I thought that I would write a new post to deal with the matter. In much of the following I am deeply indebted to the insights of James Jordan. Rather than referring you to his work at each stage I will just state that most of the good material that you are about to read is James Jordan’s; the dross is mine.
One of the greatest problems with contemporary biblical scholarship is the manner in which the distinction between the OT and the NT has become reified. Rather than merely treating the OT/NT distinction as a division that is largely just one of convenience, we tend to split the Bible into two entities — the OT and the NT. As a result of this split we have OT scholars and NT scholars, whose disciplines are, all too often, hermetically sealed off from each other. Even those of us who find this unhelpful find it hard not to fall into the error, as you can see from my post categories! NT scholars often have little more than a nodding acquaintance with the OT; OT scholars are unwilling to allow their discipline to be polluted by insights that come from the realm of NT scholarship.
Once this division has been created there are many questions that will not be tackled by either party, as they fall between the two disciplines and demand a degree of dialogue between the OT and NT that seems impossible within the current academic climate. One of the consequences of the split between the OT and the NT is that questions such as the one that is being treated in this post are seldom adequately treated. Continue reading
Posted in NT Theology, OT Theology, Theological
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Jeff Meyers on AAPC/FV/NPP Part 4
Part of the problem here is that many of the critics define the Reformed tradition extremely narrowly and do not appreciate any insights from outside the English-Scottish Presbyterian and Puritan world. So to them, these views really are “new” and challenge their comfort zone. They haven’t encountered this kind of Presbyterianism in their narrow reading and study. At the same time, I’d want to insist that even the things that might be genuinely new (e.g., I think Peter Leithart and Jim Jordan have truly broken new ground in several areas over the years) are essentially organic outgrowths of the tradition. In other words, this is not a de novo trajectory; we’re just riding out old trajectories to a further point. The example of paedocommunion is a good case study: it has a history, tracing back to the early church; it’s also consistent with the basic principles of Reformed ecclesiology, even if virtually none of the Reformers believed it. It’s at once old and new.
Those who think they are just confessing the “vanilla Westminster tradition” are, in my opinion, a bit naive. John Leith’s book on the Westminster Assembly does a really fine job showing how embedded the WCF is in the culture and philosophy of its day. Jordan dealt with this in the essay I referenced in Part 3. There is not a single person in 21st-century America who actually thinks like a mid-17th century British person. We cannot recreate the past; history is a river that only flows in one direction. Even those who are most rigidly traditionalist are really mentally updating the confession in a variety of ways, whether they are aware of it or not.
Read the whole of part 4 here.
Posted in What I'm Reading
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Metanarratives 2
Some further thoughts on why the Bible is not subject to the postmodern critique of modern metanarratives. The following is largely a case of thinking out loud. I would appreciate any comments or criticisms that people might have. We might be wise to distinguish macro-narratives from meta-narratives. They are not necessarily the same things. Metanarratives are not distinguished primarily by their size, but by the level of discourse at which they operate. The Bible is not a metanarrative because it is a first-order, not a second-order, narrative. The Bible is not a philosophy of history — it is history. However, it is a macro-narrative that serves to shape, transform and renarrate other narratives. Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Theological
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Hart, Hauerwas, God and Suffering
I have just finished reading David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?. I found it a very accessible (for Hart!) treatment of some of the theological questions raised by disasters such as the Asian tsunami, although others might be put off by Hart’s rather florid style. Continue reading
Posted in What I'm Reading
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Who am I to argue with the findings of science? HT: David Field
Posted in What I'm Reading
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Paul: Fresh Perspectives
I received (and finished reading) Wright’s Paul: Fresh Perspectives yesterday. It does what it attempts to do pretty well, although it is hardly breaking much new ground. Having read notes from AAPC2005 and attended one of Wright’s lectures at the University of Nottingham, there was little that was unfamiliar here. However, it does represent an improvement on some of Wright’s earlier treatments of this subject, in my opinion. Continue reading
Posted in NT Theology, Theological, What I'm Reading
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Metanarratives
I have just finished writing an essay on the shift from modernism to postmodernism and a Christian response to it. I sought to argue that the Christian response to postmodernism ought to be that of being far more consistently post-modern than postmodernism could ever be (as postmodernism is still committed to an economy of immance, to deferral apart from eschatology, death apart from resurrection, the ultimacy of violence as opposed to the ultimacy of peace). The following is one of the points that I made that I thought that I would share, to see if anyone wants to add anything to it or challenge it. Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Theological, What I'm Reading
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Alastair's Adversaria 