Scot McKnight has a post asking this question, starting from a book he’s read. This is a few days old, but that just adds more discussion in the comments!
Just in case anyone wonders, my position–the position I argue for in my book–is that God still speaks today. In fact, my aim in the book was to provide a coherent and simple theology for understanding how God speaks at any time and place.
I rarely post a quote from a book I’m editing, but this one struck me today. It’s from the forthcoming book The Church Under the Cross by William Powell Tuck. Here it is:
Jesus Christ has called us to a way of life which demands sacrificial living, and this call is still an offense to us today. Oh, we don’t mind hearing sermons about the cross, as long as they tell us about what God did for us in Christ. We don’t mind hearing songs about the cross. We don’t even mind singing songs about the cross or depicting the cross in paintings, sculptures, stained glass windows, or wearing the image around our nicks or on our lapels. But when we begin to realize that the cross is supposed to be a way of life, it is even more offensive to us today. Few people really live a sacrificial kind of life. But Jesus has called us to the cross-like way of life (p. 65).
How easily we wear the symbol, often made out of gold (or gold-plated), but how difficult we find it to make the symbol a part of our daily life. I think we might well find it offensive to think that the symbol we wear or admire in art should change our lives.
School suspends cancer survivor over long hair he intends to donate, says the headline at The Detroit News.
I have a very strong opinion on this, and I have no sympathy whatsoever with the school’s position. They should work out a policy to allow this sort of good deed and especially to accommodate this young man who has survived cancer. Every bit of his plan resonates with me.
Our young people need teachers and school administrators with good sense and flexibility. Our country needs more young men like J. T. Gaskins.
One of the problems I have with the word “inerrancy” is that it is understood in very different ways. If I were to ask most people in my home church what biblical inerrancy means, they would probably conflate it with certain literalistic renderings.
I disagree with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, even as laid out in the Chicago statement, for example, but it is important in debating for, about, or against this doctrine to define how one is using the term.
Jacob Allee writes a post in the context of the controversy over Mike Licona. Norman Geisler, amongst others, has accused Licona of denying biblical inerrancy for suggesting that the raising of the saints in Matthew might be apocalyptic language and not literally true. (I write about this and provide some links here.)
I appreciate his simplified definition, which I do think is good, and much closer to what you would expect a biblical scholar to mean when referring to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. He also distinguishes interpretation from the actual text, which is a valuable point.
None of this changes my mind, but I think it all clarifies the debate.
It appears he had his atheist father-in-law baptized after death. Interesting!
I think we should respect people’s decisions as they made them while they could still communicate with us. On the other hand, it suggests Mitt Romney really does believe what he claims–about his faith at least.
From what I’ve found I’m not sure if these are largely against Romney, which could at this point be explained as getting a head start on the general election (though I doubt that), or actually pro-Gingrich. (Report in the Boston Globe, hat tips Stones Cry Out and American Thinker.)
I pointed out in a comment at Stones Cry Out that one of the reasons I, as a non-Republican (as opposed to left-leaning, which I’m not sure what it means) blogger have not commented on this practice is that I didn’t know it was happening. But I’ll go further here. I think measuring things by what people do and do not condemn on blogs is a very error prone idea. For me, at least, what I comment on is determined much more by how much time I had that day than by a broader level of interest. Yes, I will choose among the things that interest me most on any particular day, but since I don’t generally go back and comment on old stories, if I don’t have time for immediate comment, I won’t.
I’m an independent in a state with close primaries. When I lived in a state with an open primary, I only voted in those primaries for people I would support in the general election if they got on the ballot. I don’t approve of the kind of advertising referenced.
But I will also note that I do not approve of the bulk of campaign finance laws. In other words, I think free speech is free speech, and it should be especially free when campaigning. And if we don’t consider the voters capable of exacting that penalty, how do we expect people they elect to manage speech any better?
Bob Cornwall has some great meditations on the lectionary texts for Epiphany 4B, which relate to the topic of When People Speak for God.
The emphasis is on hearing. I maintain that hearing is most often neglected. We often debate about whether the word is inerrant while ignoring whether our understanding of it can ever be inerrant. If we do not understand without error, of what value is an inerrant text?
Jeremy Pierce corrected an error in my original post on this topic via a comment. I’m linking here to a clarification at The Volokh conspiracy, which I think makes the difference clearer.
The original argument that this wasn’t a search was, in fact, quite ridiculous in my view, but I incorrectly reported that a warrant would be necessarily required according to this decision.
Thanks to Jeremy for this correction.
