Scribblings
What I'm reading in print and on the web
Bethel McGrew reflects on the current state of apologetics in light of a Canadian apologist appearing on Joe Rogan:
Well, I’m not afraid of post-modernism. I just don’t think it makes any sense. Which is why I think the boring old debates actually do still matter, for all that they were sometimes tedious and flawed and much more boring than they needed to be. I don’t think the New Atheists ever actually won the argument. They won a certain kind of PR war, even as they’ve lost another one. It’s a curious paradox: Nobody really likes them anymore, yet people seem to take it for granted that they were basically right, in a boring kind of way. There’s a funny moment in a new conversation between Tom Holland and Nick Cave where Holland talks about flirting with the idea of faith, then worrying “Am I betraying Richard Dawkins?” before deciding dash it all, he doesn’t care what Richard thinks. Tom is of course being light-hearted, but underneath the joke is the unquestioned assumption that there was something intellectually substantive to “betray” in the first place.
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As many of you know, one of my passions is the intersection of theology and art. I’ve discovered a new podcast that is also living at that intersection. Gary Ball and Alex Sosler are Anglican priests in Asheville, NC, and they have a podcast called, The Artistic Vision. From the description:
This podcast explores the correlation between faith and art--specifically, cultivating a sacramental imagination for creative practice. This season will feature guests ranging from practicing artists to scholars, and anywhere in between.
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I’m once again serving as tutor for an Anglican History and Theology class at the Ridley Institute. Each semester, I read Oliver O’Donovan’s masterpiece on the 39 Articles as a way to round out the conversation that my students are having as they read Martin Davie’s Our Inheritance of Faith and W.H. Griffith Thomas’ The Principles of Theology. One of the best chapters in O’Donovan’s book is the chapter on salvation and his discussion of Cranmer’s theology of predestination. O’Donovan writes:
“When we speak of man’s salvation as ‘predestined’, we are saying that the whole history of creation and salvation springs out of the eternal love which the Father bears to the Son, the love whereby he is resolved to give him a heritage, to make him ‘the first-born of many brethren’ (Romans 8:29). The phrase ‘chosen in Christ’ is not to be understood as though we were chosen and he was merely the instrument by which our choosing was given effect. We are chosen in him, because he is the chosen one, the eternal object of the Father’s good pleasure…Predestination, then, is a formal way of expressing the truth that the reality behind mankind’s salvation is the eternal relation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit within the Godhead. The doctrine of predestination underlies the denial of a purely economic trinitarianism.”
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In case you missed it, Chuck’s book is now available on Audible as an audio book. I was really hoping they’d get Adam Baldwin to narrate it. Alas, “Virtual Voice” it is. For best listening, set the speed to 1.3.