“In some strands of evangelicalism, especially in fundamentalism, God's revelation is depicted as a static deposit of truth that is directly accessible to man's reason. But this subverts the idea that God is sovereign even in his revelation, that God remains hidden until he gives himself to be known. The knowledge and grace of God are not simply available to man even in the Bible, and this means that God remains the Master and man the servant even in the area of the knowledge of God.”
-Donald Bloesch, in Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. I: God, Authority, & Salvation
I'm only about fifty pages in, but I'm enjoying this book. It's succinct, highly readable, and the author draws on a wide variety of sources. It's got to be good for me to take occasional tours across the wide domain of evangelical theology. One should know one's tradition.
Hard to categorize, more or less.
Political, more or less.
Theological, more or less.
Philosophical, more or less.
Funny, more or less.
About Me
- william randolph brafford
- Baltimore, Maryland, United States
- I grew up in North Carolina, home of the world's best barbecue, indie rock, and regional soft drinks.
3 comments:
I went to the off-Broadway production of "The Screwtape Letters" last week and it got me thinking about a lot of things related to this quote. I just scoured the Internet for the passage I wanted to quote here but I couldn't find it. :/ The gist of it is that Christians can, in a sense, become "proud of their humility." Many fundamentalists (depending on how the word is defined, of course, since there are several related definitions) are guilty of this, I think—they are so convinced that they “know God’s will,” so to speak, that they are arrogant about their so-called “revelations.”
Not that reason can’t be trusted at all—it is God-given, after all. But there’s got to be a balance between trusting your reason and accepting that God is infinitely greater than man, and therefore mysterious to man. Why is the Golden Mean so often the answer?
Being something of a mathematician, I thought for a second that you were talking about the golden ratio, and I asked myself what (1 + √5) / 2 had to do with anything… but then I realized, oh yeah, Aristotle.
Ah ha ha. My roommate Rachel took a drawing class this semester (yes, they have those at King's now and I hear the professor is superb), and she talks about the golden ratio all the time.
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