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A few days ago I received the following email from an agnostic reader of this website. The email is copied here in its [...]
We now suggest that eschatology, oriented toward the central significance of the coming of Christ in the history of redemption, provides us with more than a static theological formulation. It has deep and dynamic implications for the methodological significance of contextualization. It reminds us, to quote Vos, that “we ourselves live just as much in [...]
Biblical theology reminds us of the Christ-centered heart of the Scripture, of its history as the history of redemption. Theologizing, as the application of that redemptive history, then becomes eschatological in a deeper sense than we usually think. it is an eschatology defined not only with reference to the second coming of Christ but inclusive [...]
Biblical theology’s focus on revelation as a historical activity underlines the dynamic, rather than static, character of revealed truth. John Murray speaks of the “tendency to abstraction” on the part of systematic theology, the tendency to historicize, to arrive at “timeless” formulations in the sense of topically oriented universals. This danger becomes even more real [...]
Systematic theology is not simply a coherent arrangement of supracultural universals. it is a compilation of the Western white history of dogma. And that history, in the process of compilation, has lost its missiological thrust.
The effect of this process on the Western churches is similarly destructive of missions. Seeing theology as an essentializing science and [...]
Theology become functionally the queen of the sciences, the watchdog of the academic world, the ultimate universal. Combined with Western ethnocentrism, it produces the tacit assumption ‘that the Christian faith is already fully and properly indigenized in the West” [David J. Bloesch, "Theological Education Missionary Perspective," Missiology 10 (January 1982): 16-17]. Our credal formulations, structured [...]
Harvie Conn citing Herman Bavink, “The Future of Calvinism,” The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 5 (1894): 23
“All the misery of the Presbyterian Churches is owing to their striving to consider the Reformation as completed, and to allow no further development of what has been begun by the labor of the Reformers…. Calvinism wishes no cessation [...]
“The danger of … abstractionist thinking [we can gain "objective knowledge" of God] has always been that things are viewed as existing in themselves without taking into consideration the relationships in which they stand to other things. It asks, What is God in Himself? No movement can be applied to God; therefore we confess that [...]
As I look back on my student years at Westminster Theological Seminary (1985-89), especially as the years pass, I am beginning to count it more and more of a privilege to have been at Westminster and under Harvie Conn’s influence. Truth be told, I left Westminster for Harvard more or less focused on learning as [...]
I just received my copy of the Counterpoints book I wrote with Walter Kaiser, Jr. and Darrell Bock, Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Zondervan). The official release date, as I understand it, is October 3.
Previous to its release each author only saw his own essay, the other two essays, [...]