Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Series Updates

For anyone who actually subscribes to my blog itself, I thought I'd throw in a quick update post to explain what out of the many "series" have been started you should actually expect to continue at all:

1) I realized that I misunderstood what was distinctive about Wright's view of Israel-in-exile (it's that he thinks *Israel* had that self-understanding in the 1st century, not just that it was actually the case redemptive-historically) and so I got rid of the first post in the "Wright, So What?" series and probably won't be blogging about his specific views with any consistency for the foreseeable future. I may share thoughts on justification or the "righteousness of God" issue at some point. We'll see. No series in view, though.

2) The ecclesiology debate never really got off the ground past the first opening statements, due to time constraints with my "opponent" in his personal life, or something like that--I'm not sure of details. He may have been able to continue eventually. In any case, I came to learn after we had started our debate that he was actually part of a very strange, small group of heretical professing believers who are not only ultradispensational (Mid-Acts/Acts 9 variety), but also open theistic, and indeed into something almost like process theology, where God's essence can literally change and stuff like that. Yeah! They did not seem to have any kind of deep roots in the biblical and creedal theology of the incarnation, or the implications of that theology for Theology Proper (not that Reformed writers have been fully consistent there, ahem!--see Dr. Oliphint's brilliant work on Theology Proper)...but they were definitely off in left field on some important stuff. Reformed Baptist Christian apologist Dr. James White actually debated their pastor on some of that stuff a while ago. Pretty interesting.

3) I think I had mentioned before that I was not continuing the Romans "sermonic-style" posts. This is still the case. It's just not as useful a practice as I originally thought it would be. It could be beneficial at some level still, but effective preaching is necessarily so much more contextual, and indeed in a sense personal, than written blog posts in a sermon-like format ever could be. So still no Romans stuff.

4) So far, I am still intending to continue the Revelation reflections series...but I am not sure when. I have moved on to the second chapter of a number of books I am memorizing, but it could be really good for retaining Revelation at least, to continue this series before long. We shall see...

5) Most certainly, though, I fully intend to finish up the Baptist Faith & Message interaction sub-series in the next six months to a year, and then move on to interact with...probably...the...wait for it...Augsburg Confession! It's a shame I couldn't have started with that one, because one of our very own church members is soon to marry a wonderful Lutheran gentleman and they had to talk through the differences between Reformed and Lutheran theology before they could decide where (and whether!) they would end up together, ecclesiastically. Well Luther won that debate...c'est la vie...and she could do worse than joining our Lutheran brothers, and certainly could do worse than marrying a guy like this one. I'm very excited for their wedding. After the Augsburg Confession, though, I'm not sure what I would like to do next. I could look at the 39 Articles, parts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (there's no way I could go through every word of that on here), or I could interact with the object of my very own (qualified) confessional subscription of the Westminster Standards (the Confession or the Confession plus the catechisms). I have plenty of time to decide on that, though.

We'll see what else comes up in my theological journey, but that's all I have planned for now! God bless.

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