Paul Windsor on Calvin Klein

There’s a helpful post here from Paul Windsor, clocking the ‘remarkable ability’ of the Calvin Klein machine ‘to capture the spirit of the age and to express it in a single word’ – most recently, ‘defy’.

He sees these as contemporary equivalents to the ‘altar with an inscription’ (Acts 17:23) and ‘some of your own poets’ (Acts 17:28) in Athens, noting that the apostle Paul ‘was flexible enough to commence his preaching from “texts” in his culture — and then he was creative enough to move from there to Jesus’.

Themelios 44, 3 (December 2019)

The latest Themelios is online here (and available here as a single pdf), containing the below articles.

Editorial

D.A. Carson

But That’s Just Your Interpretation!

Strange Times

Daniel Strange

Remembering a Principal’s Principles

Robert S. Smith

Cultural Marxism: Imaginary Conspiracy or Revolutionary Reality?

What are we to make of Cultural Marxism? This article seeks to answer that question, first, by outlining the key elements and legacy of classical Marxism; second, by exploring the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci; third, by assessing the main ideas and impact of “the Frankfurt School”; and, fourth, by offering some reflections on (i) the links between these thinkers and various contemporary developments, (ii) the wisdom of employing the term Cultural Marxism, and (iii) how Christians should respond to the current “culture wars” that are polarizing the Western world.

Hans Madueme

Adam and Sin as the Bane of Evolution? A Review of Finding Ourselves After Darwin

The diverse essays in Stanley Rosenberg’s edited volume Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018) offer a Christian analysis of the human person in light of evolutionary thinking. The recommendations to revise our understanding of original sin and theodicy raise particularly challenging questions. Traditional interpretations of Scripture, for instance, are often devalued in order to reduce tensions with our current scientific understanding. Additionally, the more radical arguments undercut doctrines that earlier Christians believed are pivotal to the biblical story. Overall, these noteworthy essays represent a wide range of creative possibilities for updating our theological anthropology in line with a post-Darwinian setting, but they are less convincing when justifying the theological cost for doing so.

William D. Mounce

Do Formal Equivalent Translations Reflect a Higher View of Plenary, Verbal Inspiration?

The article begins by establishing five categories of translation theory and argues that functional translations like the NIV do in fact reflect the meaning of every Greek word, but not in the same way as formal equivalent translations do. Therefore, formal equivalent translations cannot claim a higher view of inspiration.

Matthew Swale

Power for Prayer through the Psalms: Cassiodorus’s Interpretation of the Honey of Souls

Exegesis, prayer, and spiritual formation converge in the Psalms commentary written by Cassiodorus (490–584). Each psalm’s exegesis ends with a “conclusion” considering the implications for morality, doctrine, or prayer. This study focuses on how Cassiodorus’s exegesis of the Psalms provides power for prayer. First, Cassiodorus’s rich expositions of the Psalms of Ascent and Psalm 142 illustrate his approach to the Psalter as God’s provision of superior, life-changing words. Second, prayer flows from Cassiodorus’s handling of individual psalms in four ways: prayerful exegesis, prayer exemplars, prayer templates, and prayer as the means to psalmic formation.

Kenneth J. Stewart

The Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism: Initial Encounters

Commemorations of the birth of the Oxford Movement (later known as Anglo-Catholicism) have regularly intimated certain early commonalities with evangelicalism, especially within the Church of England. It was so at the 1933 centenary of the launch of the movement; such hypotheses have been given fresh life with the 2017 release of the Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement. This essay examines the basis for these suggestions and finds them wanting.

Kyle Beshears

Athens without a Statue to the Unknown God

Apatheism is indifference and apathy toward the existence of God. In our secular age, a person adopts apatheism when they feel a sense of existential security absent God, effectively dissolving their reason, motivation, and will to care about questions related to his existence. This indifference presents a stronger challenge for evangelism than does religious pluralism, agnosticism, and atheism. For this reason, evangelicals ought to explore ways of engaging apatheism.

Mark Boone

Inerrancy Is Not a Strong or Classical Foundationalism

The general idea of strong foundationalism is that knowledge is founded on well warranted beliefs that do not derive any warrant from other beliefs and that all our other beliefs depend on these foundational ones for their warrant. Although inerrancy posits Scripture as a solid foundation for theology, the idea that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy involves a strong foundationalist epistemology is deeply problematic. In fact, inerrancy does not require any particular view of the structure of knowledge, and notable sources on inerrancy tout it in ways inconsistent with most forms of strong foundationalism.

Daniel Wiley

The God Who Reveals: A Response to J.L. Schellenberg’s Hiddenness Argument

The challenge of divine hiddenness has become one of the greatest advocates for skepticism in modern philosophical debate. From this challenge, Schellenberg has developed the now acclaimed hiddenness argument. For Schellenberg, an all-loving God would be always open to personal relationships with finite creatures, and thus all nonbelief would derive from resistance to God. However, the existence of nonresistant nonbelievers, or those who have never resisted the idea of God, must prove that God does not exist, for surely an all-loving God would leave enough evidence of himself to convince finite creatures of his existence and prevent nonresistant nonbelief. In response, I argue that (1) openness to personal relationships and love are not as correlated as the hiddenness argument demands, (2) nonresistant nonbelief is not provable, and (3) Schellenberg fails to reason to God’s omni-benevolence apart from Scripture.

Book Reviews

Foundations 77 (Autumn 2019)

Issue 77 of Foundations: An International Journal of Evangelical Theology, published by Affinity, is now available (here in its entirety as a pdf), which includes the below essays. The summaries are take from Lee Gatiss’ editorial.

Lee Gatiss

Editorial

Lee Gatiss

Contending in the Perpetual Battle: Jude and the Constant Need to Fight Valiantly Against Heresy

In my article... on the epistle of Jude, I outline what that pithy letter has to say about contending for the faith. He calls us to join the struggle against false teaching in defence of orthodoxy, because there is a perpetual battle raging... Yet Jude’s advice is distinctly different to what many might expect. Just as James warned his readers to avoid bitterly ambitious quarrelsomeness based on wisdom that is ‘earthly, unspiritual, and demonic’ (James 3:15), so contending for the faith, in Jude’s book, is an activity characterised by mercy, and self-awareness.

Tom Woolford

The use of Satire in the Book of Isaiah and in Christian Ministry

There is at least a case for some careful use of satire in Christian communication, as Dr Tom Woolford points out in his article... on the use of that comedic device in the book of Isaiah. After studiously defining what satire is, and its various types, he exegetes certain passages in Isaiah to show how the prophet repeatedly uses not only subtle but also biting satire to make his points. Examining and unpacking the implications of this for us today, he is also wise to note that there are certain controls on the use of satire, which mean that zealous firebrands in social media groups ought to be wary about its use, and cognisant of the usual effects of it before they leap in.

Jake Eggertsen

Is the Filioque Clause Biblical?

One area of theology where there has been sharp debate in the past is over the so-called Filioque clause in the Nicene Creed. Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son? This question divided Eastern and Western Christendom almost a thousand years ago, and it still divides many today. In an exercise in ‘constructive dogmatics’, Jake Eggertsen examines this question... He seeks to engage with Scripture and tradition in dialogue with theologians from the past and the present to help answer this important Trinitarian question, in a way that is irenic and thoughtful.

Tim Dieppe

The Same God: Did Paul Claim the Athenians Worshipped Yahweh?

We return to the Areopagus in Athens to look at what Paul’s address to the Greek philosophers of his day can teach us about the fraught question of whether Christians and Muslims worship ‘the same God’. Does Paul’s speech on Mars’ Hill about an ‘Unknown God’ he was now making known to them justify referring to Allah as the same God as the God of the Bible, as some people think it does? In constructing his case against this recently popularised idea, Tim Dieppe interacts with sources ancient and modern, to help us in our apologetics today.

Donald John MacLean

Knocking on Sinners’ Doors? Revelation 3:20, Ecclesiology and the Gospel Offer in Seventeenth-Century Puritanism

Donald John MacLean looks in depth at the question of whether Jesus standing at the door and knocking in Revelation 3:20 is an evangelistic appeal or not. Many have seen it that way, and preached it that way to great effect, but it is common today for commentators to reject such use in mass evangelism, and many are concerned with the picture often painted of a seemingly impotent Christ yearning for unbelievers to exercise their free will and open the door so he can save them. On the other hand, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Reformed writers and preachers did actually draw stirring conversionist appeals from the picture of Jesus standing at the door, without theological qualms. As an expert in historical theology, MacLean examines why, and finds that ecclesiology matters far more than we may realise when it comes to our application of the Bible in preaching.

Book Reviews