December 2009 Quick Update!
By jaminhubner on Dec 6, 2009 in Maintenance
- Just got back from an annual hunting trip up at the lodge. Many highlights, family, food, a gorgeous river view, and of course, the hunt. So the short story is I literally…nope. Not gonna say what happened to this poor pheasant…let’s just say, upon odd circumstances, his cranial consciousness necessarily departed from his lower body at an ungodly short muzzle range…
- Complimentarianism takes a hit with a new release JETS article by a Gordon-Conwell Ph.D. I’m hoping for a guest blog-writer to contribute his valuable insight. I offered some gentle critiques of Groothuis’ gender relativism (“egalitarianism”/”evangelical feminism”) many moons ago. Sigh. Someday evangelical conservatives are going to wake up and realize the real villain in the gender/sexuality wars isn’t feminism, it isn’t liberalism, it isn’t TV, movie, stars and the approval of rampant homosexuality, and it isn’t postmodern culture forcing women pastors into churches. But rather, the war is waged at the level of presuppositions and worldview; that is to say, the real problem is gender relativism. Books and books and books have been written about all truth being relative, from Douglas Groothuis’ Truth Decay to Greg Koukl’s Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air to Copan’s Truth for You But Not For Me (all excellent books by the way). Historians and apologists alike have shown the damage epistemological relativism can be to a society. And yet, there is a virtual disconnect with Christian thinkers when it comes to homosexuality, female pastors, and gender roles; these problems are miniatures of the larger problem. It’s not total relativism; it’s gender relativism. General relativism of truth says all truths are relative, while gender relativism only says a small (although important) group of truths is relative. The consequence, the symptom, is the vote results on gay marriage, the results of denomination/conferences on female pastors, and the day to day struggles between married couples, not the cause of the bigger problems…In short, gender relativism is quite relevant to the Christian apologist, since it asserts that some of the whole truth offered by the Christian worldview is relative (proponents would rather call it “subjective” or “social constructs”). Indeed, relavitism, humanism, and the devices of the Evil One rarely come all at once; he does things piecemeal fashion – and within the church. Tricky, indeed.
- Ironic enough, that for seminary (Critical Thinking course), I was assigned (I didn’t have a real choice) to debate the negative on the question “Does the Bible teach that women can be pastors?” The debate takes over the course of all of this week. I’ve already collected a small library for a possible book in the future regarding gender and sexuality (to meet the above need), so it should be productive (although I have a late start). I don’t currently associate myself with either side of the debate (complimentarianism or egalitarianism), even though most of the conclusions on the right-wing side (complimentarianism) I believe to be true, although often for slightly different reasons than complimentarians suppose. However, when push comes to shove with exegesis and “doing theology” (the topic as of late on the podcasts), especially in recent publications that specifically flesh out hermeneutics and the feminism issue such as Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology, the Reformed and traditional exegetes often, indeed, demonstrate an upper hand. More on that later…
- Lord willing, there will be a very important article coming up for publication on the scholarship page entitled “When Philosophy Trumps Theology: A Case Study in Contemporary Epistemology, Scriptural Authority, and Apologetic Method.”
- …As well as an additional article that some of you have been anticipating: “A Christian Theory of Information.” Most Christian apologists don’t know, but information poses just as big of a problem for naturalistic skeptics (especially ones big into biology like Dawkins, etc.) as the laws of logic, uniformity of nature, etc. If my research is pointing in the right direction, information, of virtually any kind, has tremendous potential for a presuppositionalist apologetic. And no, it’s not just another design argument, but a new battle ground for TAG.
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