A book

Well, there is a book for us. It's called "Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective" edited by Gary North. Here's a quote that seem to say what we were saying at the first meeting we had...

"...Christian students need to be aware of the fact that their position if consistently biblical and revelational - and especially creedal - should not be an intellectual embarassment to them. They should not be afraid to make their position known, in whatever discipline they find themselves. ...They should help to improve that position by applying it in new and promising ways. For too long now we Christians in the academic disciplines have been suffering from a debilitating lack of an intellectual division of labor. There is work to be accomplished and an earth ot be subdued. Maybe even a moon, too."

I don't know about the moon part (and it took North from pages 3 to 24 to get to that point, and not really even address the point itself), but right on. Check out the table of contents from the one review on amazon here, and know that 1)it's in the church library, but I've got it right now, and 2)for 10 bucks you can get a copy too. The first chapter-in-earnest goes after whether or not there is a 'common ground' from which we can all (covenant and non-covenant folks) sit around and talk the facts. Turns out that that the common ground for the non-covenant person is borrowed ground. Very VanTillian.

Van Til, leafing through.

Suffering

The topic of suffering has been on my mind a lot lately, and its no wonder why. This Lord's Day the Lafayette RPC sat under two sermons on the topic of responding to suffering. In weekly Bible study, we're reading and examining 1 Peter, which has a lot to say on suffering. Not only that, I just introduced the students of Crown & Covenant Academy to Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in which she recounts, among other things, her daughter dying in her arms and witnessing the abuse of a pregnant woman.

A new book by John Piper and Justin Taylor addresses the topic of human suffering and God's sovereignty well. You can read the introduction and first chapter of Suffering and the Sovereignty of God here as a pdf. Piper calls us to celebrate God's sovereignty over Satan. I'm posting this here (rather than on my other blog) because I've noticed that many of my academic friends and colleagues have a deep desire for justice, and a sense that their work benefits the poor and oppressed. My question for you, then, is what do you think academic work does to ease the pain of living in a fallen world? Is our work in Christ's Kingdom restorative?

Confession Debate

How should God's people argue with one another? How should they live together with those who are not following God's word? And how do we discern between those who are dangerously, sinfully heretical and those who have a genuine difference of conviction?

I'm asking this because I'm spending today working on my dissertation, and because I happened to just read Doug Wilson's latest. Essentially, Wilson is arguing that he and his FV cohorts are more in line with the tenets of the Westminster Confession than their Reformed opponents. I am certainly not trying to start a debate on FV (Or anything else of Wilson. Every time that guy writes a book some part of my life plan goes up in smoke.). However, I think it is important to consider and recognize, as Reformed Christian thinkers, the role that the Confession plays in our practice of religion. While I'm not going to say that the confession is in any particular way false, I do want to challenge the notion of standing upon the Confession. Can a group or individual argue that he/she is more closely, more carefully following Christ because his/her agenda/belief fits more carefully with the Confession?

One reason that I'm curious about this is that I'm studying the Parliament in the 1640s as part of this chapter of my diss. Samuel Gorton, after being shuttled around the NE colonies throughout the 1640s and put on trial by the gov't of the United Colonies for illegally buying land from Indians, headed over to England to petition Parliament for the right to stay put on his land and be left alone (this was long before SG could settle with like-minded folks in the wilderness of Idaho). Parliament, who was embroiled in a fierce civil war with King Charles I, was also listening to frequent sermons from--guess who?--the Westminster Divines. From the Wilson statements above, a Parliament that is hearing from these Westminister folks should be a pretty orthodox Parliament. However, the Committee for Foreign Plantations sent SG back to NE with a letter telling the Puritans to leave him alone. And Gorton did return to his land--but only after a few years chilling out with a bunch of like-minded folks. See, as the Parliament took control and the king was on the run, the lid was off in terms of religious orthodoxy in England. We may now celebrate that this led wise and godly men to meet and compose the Westminister confession, but we also must recognize that this produced the ideal condition for the production of much heretical and heterodox teaching.

So, I'm going to suggest that the lid is off in terms of orthodoxy here in America, and it has been for awhile. It might be important for someone to answer Wilson's call for a debate. But let's think--are the sheep under DW and his FV buddies uninformed? I would say not. I would say that those Christians who are with Wilson, et al, know full well where those theological lines are being drawn. Let's take a lesson from history and focus our Reformed, good theology energies not just on drawing the lines of orthodoxy, but also for convincing those on the margins--those who are in the realm of the uninformed & heterodox--and showing them the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

Singing Nonsense

I'm going to go ahead and copy-paste from a conversation I just had via e-mail with Jared.

Jared suggested that I read this nifty article about a new book, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen.

I responded with the following objections that I have to the idea that language evolved:

1. To accommodate the production of speech, humans evolving from apes had to evolve a lower larynx to open up the vocal tract and allow for sounds other than nasals (if not, all we could produce would be "mmmm, nnn" kind of sounds), but this made us more prone to choking. Seeing that apes do a fairly good job learning basic signs of sign language, even though they aren't capable of putting them together in a language-like way, it doesn't make sense that if communication was so important for our survival and sign language was such a viable option for communication that we would evolve in such a way as to increase the risk of choking to death.

2. Linguists are constantly pointing to the simplification of grammar and saying that there are a set number of grammatical categories, and we don't invent new ones; we don't seem to innovate language to make it more complicated, but to make it easier or more efficient (the loss of difficult to produce sounds over time, the loss of fine-grained grammatical distinctions, etc.). To say that we started from scratch and added more complexity only to at some point turn the trend around and start getting rid of stuff again doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

3. We see that babies isolated from input don't seem to learn language, so the question is, how did we ever begin inventing language in the first place without some sort of linguistic input to start us off? If we were capable of doing that, did we lose that ability? That seems to put us at an evolutionary disadvantage.

The first level

Let's face it, you've got to go up to get out of purduegatory. And like Eden was up on a hill (rivers flowed out of Eden, right?), so Paul clashed with the brainiacs at Mars Hill. Audio. Journal. This is the publication that really makes me feel like an idiot. Every time I listen, I know that I do not know as I should. But they've got this new podcast called Audition for frees. And you don't even need a Pod. See there? One venial fault corrected.

Elizabeth and I are here in her office (SC G54 for anyone who'd like to stop by and view the mystery bag), and we're excited to start this new blog.

So, here's our opening comment (which is really not BY us, as much as copied and pasted BY us):

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.
Colossians 2:6-10