What RTS Believes . . .

"What RTS Believes: An Affirmation." That's the title of the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Reformed Theological Seminary's quarterly magazine, Ministry & Leadership. When I reflexively rolled my eyes upon seeing it, the light hit the cover at just the right angle and I noticed a textual hologram embedded just underneath the subtitle. It read, "In Contradistinction to What Bruce Waltke Said Last Month." As you can see, the cover depicts, maybe a tad piously, an open Bible, suggesting that the "Affirmation" will have something to do with RTS taking the Bible seriously. And so it should. The other, somewhat ironic, thing you'll notice is that the "Affirmation" coming from this Reformed seminary is taking place within the walls of a rather ornate...

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Holy Grief

In the Holy Scriptures, we see the holiness of God everywhere assumed. We see how this holiness informs both his love and his wrath. No doubt, too, we will recognize that God isn’t more loving than holy, or more holy than loving, or, for that matter, more wrathful toward the ungodly than just, or more just than wrathful toward the ungodly, or more powerful than good, or more good than powerful, or more blessed than faithful, or, well, you get the picture. God is all God, all of the time. He lacks in nothing. He is the great I AM, the Lord of the covenant, and he is jealous of his lordship. He doesn’t take kindly to rulers who pretend they can rule apart from his authority (see John 19:10–11), nor does he like it when his children attempt to...

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Unreal City

I'M NOT EXACTLY SURE WHY, as I've not read T.S. Eliot's Waste Land with an eye on analysis (even though I've read it many times), but the following few lines have haunted me for years (ll. 60–63):Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.The modern "city," with all its complex features as a topos (a standardized setting, an archetypal place), figures prominently in modernist literature. It appears that upon further inspection, what has struck me about these four lines lies somewhat close to the poet's intention. The city is an empty shill, symbolizing all that modernity has driven us toward—isolation, disconnection, sterility, devoid of the divine,...

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You Will Read This (unless, of course, you don't)

So, can an attempt even be made to apply the hermeneutic laid out in the previous posts (parts 1, 2, and 3) to certain predictions found in the New Testament? This may be where the discussion gets heated for some, given our millennial madness in the church. It's one thing to suggest that one of Amos' prophecies didn't come about the way he described it because of some intervening historical contingency; it's another thing (some may say) to apply that principle to the words Jesus and the apostles spoke concerning the "end times." Unsurprisingly, Richard Pratt, in When Shall These Things Be? A Reformed Response to Hyper-Preterism, does just that. But not much. He spends about seven pages on "historical contingencies and New Testament Eschatology,"...

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