2010-01-10

Hays warns against the problem of taking a philosophical orientation as your theological starting point. Hence, men like Liccione, Cross, Beckwith, etc. give us a hypothetical model of how they’d like the church to be, a lovely exercise in make-believe devoid of tangible connections to OT, NT and church history. Dismissing sola scriptura out of hand due to its ‘antecedent unlikelihood’ forms a vicious circle as one has no incentive to study the Bible with an eye to how God actually administers the covenant community. i) Liccione writes as if he must convert the non-propositional content of Scripture into dogma. It’s odd because the Scripture is full of propositions. Rearranging and reexpressing them isn’t a bad exercise (e.g. creeds). But we’re deriving from revelation. Maybe he doesn’t think of Scripture as revelatory, but views it like an archaeologist who must excavate to get at the revelation below all the non-revelation. ii) The Romanist assumes that God’s inscripturated word is insufficient in itself to clearly express God’s intent, thus requiring another overlaid mechanism to identify His intent. But John wrote 1 John to adjudicate a crisis without his presence or further recourse to the apostle. iii) Having a written record has its obvious advantages. iv) When we talk about differing interpretations, we have to distinguish (unlike the Romanist) between an honest and a willful difference of opinion. It’s doubtful that John’s opponents assented to 1 John. v) While the infallible Magisterium is posed as the alternative to fallible human interpretations of sources, even fallible human opinions are under the providential control of God. These are not autonomous variables. An infallible God can work his will through fallible human opinions. Fallibility creates the possibility of error, but it doesn’t equate to being in error. Again, the example of 1 John comes up. The Romanist assumes 1 John lacks the “requisite definitiveness” needed to resolve things. What if the church had cried, it’s inadequate?! when they received the letter? vi) The inquirer trying to decide between Prot. and Catholicism should consider which approach to doctrine is rooted in divine precedent, not just ‘which one will settle things best’. vii) The infallible visible authority is a paper theory. Indeed, the church of Rome certainly doesn’t give the appearance of being either infallible or indefectible. viii) Why is a fallible layman like Liccione lecturing us on behalf of the indispensible magisterium? Once Upon an A Priori

Hays has a biting satire of the Manhattan declaration here. A taste: “II. We Affirm Together… Jesus Christ is Lord. Unless he's the Archangel Michael. Either affirmation is rationally defensible.” Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses Together- The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium

This post interacts with an atheist over creationism. i) Christian creationist agree observational science is based on measurable, verifiable evidence, which is one reason they reject neo-Darwinian evolution as a legit scientific model. ii) The Bible tells us that God created each individual organism to reproduce after its kind, which is exactly what we see today. iii) Selection pressure combined with point mutations causes great variation. Creationists expect this. But goo to you transformations are not expected, nor have they ever been clearly shown. He cites non-Christian Hubert Yockey comparing the faith of evolutionists in the probability of origins by chance in primeval soup to believing in a perpetual machine. iv) Speciation occurs through natural selection/point mutations working on information already present in the DNA. Dogs remain dogs. So scientist Lee Spetner at Johns Hopkins: “But in all the reading I've done in the life-sciences literature, I've never found a mutation that added information.” They all reduce information. v) To idea that new  information originate through mutations, central to evolution, Dr. Werner Gitt replies that mutations can only cause changes in existing information – there can never be an increase in information. They cannot be the source of new creative information. vi) Thus it takes great belief to hold evolution. vii) Faith is not opposed to have reason. We do not reason to have faith, we have faith first in order to correctly reason. The atheist assumes that people can only know things through ‘measurable, verifiable evidence’. This is circular reasoning since he arbitrarily assumes this idea, without empirically proving it. Everyone begins with a set of beliefs. “do you know that the proposition "empiricism is the only way we can have knowledge" itself be known through empirical investigation? Can you "measure" and "verify" the existence of the concept of empiricism in a test tube or a petri dish? How about the laws of logic?” viii) Christian creationist scientists believe some information can be gained through empirical investigation, but not all. If you are an ardent naturalistic materialist, then you have no category for immaterial things like logic or concepts. A naturalist materialist has no basis for using logical law because his worldview doesn’t provide the category needed for immaterial things. ix) Empiricism is self-refuting; and if the Bible wasn’t true, you couldn’t prove anything at all. Biblical truth provides the necessary preconditions. x) To the common retort that we just want it to be made by a god: "Religious unbelievers fervently want the universe and its contents to not have been created and guided by a god and, come what may, it must be so." xi) Dawkins claims to want open debate, but then refuses to actually debate. xii) Facts do not speak for themselves; conclusions differ greatly because they come to the evidence with different presuppositions that make up their antithetical worldviews. Atheism Feedback Response 1-6-10

Hays notes the contrast between the Manhattan declarionation’s ‘Kumbaya rhetoric’ about protestants and catholics and the scorched earth rhetoric at Romanist sites like Called to Communion or Return to Rome – where you see what they really think of Protestants. He then interacts with Romanist Francis Beckwith over sola scriptura: i) Beckwith makes the same arguments as Dan Brown and Bart Ehrman regarding competing texts. ii) This is typical because its Protestants who are opposing them, not Romanists. iii) To the idea that the Bible does not yet exist as a whole, the church does not yet exist as a whole. Unlike the Bible, the church is still a work in progress. iv) The inspired ‘table of contents’ argument ignored the massive intertextual evidence we have. v) That the Biblical writers quote individuals in different languages than they spoke, whether to translate is hardly a problem. vi) The Bible can implicitly address a question – it’s not just what’s explicit. We can use reason where its silent. vii) The Bible gives us a combination of general norms and case-laws we can apply to analogous situations. viii) Beckwith is using improbable and weak objections to promote his defeatist attitude of Scripture. ix) To the charge of the mess things like Open Theism makes, Hays notes that Catholic philosopher Nicholas Rescher is a process theologian. The friend of my enemy

Russ Moore has a review of Avatar. i) He notes that it is not an argument, not an appeal, not a narrative, just anti-American propaganda mediated through shock and awe technology. ii) This quote is somewhat chilling: “Of course, James Cameron is the same man whose moving images and music caused theaters full of “family values” Christians to tear up and cheer two teenagers fornicating in an abandoned car on the RMS Titanic. ” Southern Seminary student Daniel Pattersonsaid, “This is Perelandra meets Jurassic Park.”http://www.russellmoore.com/2009/12/18/avatar-rambo-in-reverse/

John Frame reviews David VanDrunen's A Biblical Case for Natural Law. HT: A Biblical Case for Natural Law. See also here: The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology