Creation is an important theological topic. However, as soon as you start talking about creation you have to give a number of disclaimers. When people hear you say “creation” they are likely to think you are talking about “creationism,” “creation science,” or “Intelligent Design.” This confuses things. People are likely to think you’re a fundie before you’ve even started to make your point.
What is a concise and simple way to define creation over against creationism?
Peter Enns and Westminster Theological Seminary have reached “mutually agreeable terms” wherein Enns will discontinue work on August 1. An official statement from the seminary has the audacity to say,
The administration wishes to acknowledge the valued role Prof. Enns has played in the life of the institution, and that his teaching and writings fall within the purview of Evangelical thought. The Seminary wishes Prof. Enns well in his future endeavors to serve the Lord.
What? Valued? So why did you sack him?
On a more humorous note, Alan Lenzi reports that WTS is looking for a new professor who has the “ability to read the Westminster Confession of Faith in its original language... Candidates who seek non-traditional answers to 'problems,' which are not problems at all, value independent thinking, and/or have a PhD from a suspect graduate program in America need not apply.”
(Even their names sound similar!)
Today I heard a funny quip about Methodists: Methodists don’t believe in sex because they are afraid it will lead to dancing.
Marilynne Robinson, author of the theologically-rich
Oh, and feel free to earn me some Amazon credit by ordering the book here.
“Man is created not to minister to the gods but to cultivate the earth.”
- Claus Westermann
When pentecostalism entered its second century it had become the fastest growing expression of the Christian faith and one of the largest. The phenomenon that began in a small mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles has spread from North America to Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America. As a global movement the original sounds of pentecostalism have been remixed and now can be heard through the voices of those from all nations. This blog is dedicated to making those voices heard.
-- Jane Vella
The Center for Dewey Studies together with The Center for Inquiry is planning John Dewey's 150th Birthday Celebration: An International Conference on Dewey's Impact on America and the World.
Invited Speakers include Nadine Strossen, current President of the American Civil Liberties Union; Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University; and Larry Hickman, Director of the Center for Dewey Studies.
The conference will be held October 22-24, 2009 at the Center for Inquiry in
Eugene Peterson starts Eat this Book with a spirited critique of experience, envisioning it clashing with the Bible (see below). This seems to be a popular thing to say these days. But I don’t get it. We do not have a choice over whether or not we will employ experience as an “authority for living” – experience simply is. All people, from the pragmatist to the idealists, use experience as an authority.
Of course, what we do with experience– whether we reconstruct it or not – is quite important. Any pragmatist worth his salt will tell you that “pure experience” isn’t worth much to anyone. But that does not invalidate experience, does it?
It will not do to simply create dichotomies between Scripture and self, Bible and experience (like Peterson does below). At least that’s true in my experience.
I want to counter this widespread practice of taking personal experience instead of the Bible as the authority for living. I want to pull the Christian Scriptures back from the margins of the contemporary imagination where they have been so rudely elbowed by their glamorous competitors, and reestablish them at the center as the text for living the Christian life deeply and well. I want to confront and expose this replacement of the authoritative Bible by the authoritative self. I want to place personal experience under the authority of the Bible and not over it. I want to set the Bible before us as the text by which we live our lives, this text that stands in such sturdy contrast to the potpourri of religious psychology, self-development, mystical experimentation, and devotional dilettantism that has come to characterize so much of what takes cover under the umbrella of “spirituality.”
Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual
