If you read professional columnists with any regularity, you can pick up when they are about to leave on vacation or are spending most of their time repainting the rumpus room. There are a few tricks, you see, for knocking out this week’s column with minimum effort, and if you play your cards right, you will even have fodder to meet at least two more deadlines in the near future. First trick: write a “controversial column” where you skewer (either ruthlessly or apologetically) a touchy subject. Personal religious convictions are great for this, but only where they are at odds with your tradition’s leadership (”I am a committed Catholic, but I just can’t in good conscience give up my pro-condom, pro-abortion convictions”). This is guaranteed to generate plenty of e-mails and phone calls which will be quoted at length in future columns.
Another trick: quote egregious sources and briefly comment on them with an air of feigned disbelief or haughty disdain. This requires little creativity or ingenuity, and it is bound to put the writer in a good light. It is precisely to this gimmick that I now capitulate, and present to you the following.
In light of Tim’s present theological enterprises, I submit to you the following theological quotations. They have been gleaned from various teaching and grading duties and are submitted for your reading pleasure.
Part I: “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
God has chosen to reveal himself to us mainly through his Word, which we call general revelation. It is a revelation to all people.
Yessir. All people…who can read…or who have heard said Word rightly preached in their tongue. That’s pretty much ‘all people’. Maybe we should have a category for “Master Sergeant Revelation”, to bust open this artificial distinction between the officer’s revelation and the Word to the enlisted men.
Augustine taught that God knows all things that includes all future events. God can use his foreknowledge to know, and elect those who will have faith.
This would be the lesser-known, Arminian Augustine, a 17th century graduate of the Sorbonne Academy of Theology and Applied Pastor Studies. His surname also caused confusion: “of Hypo.” (History is unclear whether he was indeed diabetic and required insulin shots as documented in his rough autobiography, or if he obtained a false prescription for hypodermic needles from a distant uncle and suffered from daily injections of low-grade smack, which is suggested by the prolific amount and sketchy nature of his writings.)
A prophet or great man or woman of God was revered because God chose to speak to his people through them. For example, Balaam says, “But can I say just anything? I must speak only what God puts in my mouth.”
Maybe not the BEST example of a godly, revered prophet? In a related theological category, a great ass was revered because God chose to speak to his people through it. This made livestock auctions a bit more interesting in the ancient world, before modernism choked out the even the possibility of chatty, spiritually concerned asses. Thankfully, many have begun to question contemporary evangelicalism’s wholesale kowtowing to modernism, and again we are seeing livestock reintroduced into “spiritual community encounters” as young, progressive, spiritually open people bring livestock back into their worship experiences.
In both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic tradition, creation is the object of our faith.
We suspected it all along, now didn’t we? All those fancy hats and robes barely mask those pagan underpinnings. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci is proved oh-so-very right yet again.
In Jude 4, Paul indicates that some people were “designated for this condemnation.”
Scholars are divided on this point. Did Paul of Tarsus just use “Jude” as a pen-name to avoid the notorious Bithynian paparazzi, or was this “Jude” simply a generic title for a sub-group of the Pauline school? We do know for certain that this short epistle shows evidence of serious redaction; for instance at least one early manuscript contains the addendum “the minute you let these underneath your skin, then you begin to make it better. [better..better…better. Nah. Nah. Nah. NahNaNahNaaaaaa]” at the end of verse 16.
More to come. Much, much more.
Adeodatus
