News
Reading Lately:
-The Life of Charles Hodge by A.A. Hodge
-The German Education of Christian Scholar Philip Schaff: the Formative Years, 1889-1844 by Klaus Penzel
-other stuff related to 19th century American theologians' education in Germany (thesis stuff)
-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (still moving...at about a chapter a week or so)
Listening Lately:
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Sufjan Stevens - Michigan and Illinois
Radiohead - various
Dave Matthews Band - various
Sigur Ros - ()
Bob Marley - various
Thinking Lately:
I've recently listened to some apologetics lectures by the philosopher Gordon Clark and he stressed the idea of Christianity (specifically in its Reformed expression) as a system that all works together logically and consistently. (Francis Schaeffer seems to make a similar point.) When people accuse him of subordinating God or theology to logic, he replies that logic is simply the way God thinks. Therefore to say God is "bound" by logic makes no more sense than saying that God is bound by his love or justice. Thus, all theology forms a logically consistent system and if it doesn't, there's a problem.
As a Christian and philosophy major, I generally agree. But every once in a while the PoMo part of me starts to question whether the truth presented in the Bible can really be condensed into a perfectly logical system of propositional truth. On the one hand, if the truth revealed in the Bible isn't logical, we have a problem. If the law of non-contradiction doesn't hold, it becomes meaningless for us to say that God is good because it might be just as true that he is evil. So it seems like logic must hold in order for us to make any sense of God's word. But then when I read the narratives that fill much of the Bible, I start wondering if the writers ever intended for it to be extracted and placed into a modernistic systematic framework.
I suppose my real question is whether a particular truth can be equally represented in narrative and abstract propositional system. Or do the two formulations give their own unique coloring to the truth? (Or in Neil Postman's words, does "the medium control the message"? Why did Jesus prefer to tell stories about the kingdom and God rather than present a complete, concise, propositional system, and why do our Gospel presentations often look more like the latter rather than the former? More questions than answers on my part...
-The Life of Charles Hodge by A.A. Hodge
-The German Education of Christian Scholar Philip Schaff: the Formative Years, 1889-1844 by Klaus Penzel
-other stuff related to 19th century American theologians' education in Germany (thesis stuff)
-Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (still moving...at about a chapter a week or so)
Listening Lately:
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Sufjan Stevens - Michigan and Illinois
Radiohead - various
Dave Matthews Band - various
Sigur Ros - ()
Bob Marley - various
Thinking Lately:
I've recently listened to some apologetics lectures by the philosopher Gordon Clark and he stressed the idea of Christianity (specifically in its Reformed expression) as a system that all works together logically and consistently. (Francis Schaeffer seems to make a similar point.) When people accuse him of subordinating God or theology to logic, he replies that logic is simply the way God thinks. Therefore to say God is "bound" by logic makes no more sense than saying that God is bound by his love or justice. Thus, all theology forms a logically consistent system and if it doesn't, there's a problem.
As a Christian and philosophy major, I generally agree. But every once in a while the PoMo part of me starts to question whether the truth presented in the Bible can really be condensed into a perfectly logical system of propositional truth. On the one hand, if the truth revealed in the Bible isn't logical, we have a problem. If the law of non-contradiction doesn't hold, it becomes meaningless for us to say that God is good because it might be just as true that he is evil. So it seems like logic must hold in order for us to make any sense of God's word. But then when I read the narratives that fill much of the Bible, I start wondering if the writers ever intended for it to be extracted and placed into a modernistic systematic framework.
I suppose my real question is whether a particular truth can be equally represented in narrative and abstract propositional system. Or do the two formulations give their own unique coloring to the truth? (Or in Neil Postman's words, does "the medium control the message"? Why did Jesus prefer to tell stories about the kingdom and God rather than present a complete, concise, propositional system, and why do our Gospel presentations often look more like the latter rather than the former? More questions than answers on my part...
Labels: Philosophy, Theology
