James's Weblog

Perspectives and Pratt (II)

Sat, 16/09/2006 - 09:12 -- James Oakley

OK. Let me try and be a little clearer.

John Frame says (if I understand him correctly) that, in the act of God making himself known to me, there are 3 perspectives through which this can be viewed.

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Pratt on Old Testament Narrative, Frame on Perspectives

Fri, 15/09/2006 - 18:47 -- James Oakley

Yet again, I'm sure this has been said numerous times. But I'll record it here by way of "note to self"...

Richard Pratt's book He Gave Us Stories discusses handling OT narratives. Recommend it. Part 1 of the book discusses how we approach stories - not in terms of techniques to follow, but in terms of the kind of approach we need. He only mentions Frame very occasionally, but a lot of what he says is along the lines of "Don't set this method / approach over against that method / approach, as if you must pick one or the other. You need both."

[Edit: This post originally had a lot more after this point, but I've since managed to write what I was saying more clearly. Have a look at the post immediately after (chronologically) this one. So I've removed the unclear stuff I wrote originally. Cut!]

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Hurricanes

Fri, 15/09/2006 - 12:07 -- James Oakley

Who decided to name the next hurricane about to attempt havoc-wreaking on the United States, "Gordon"?

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Election and the covenant / Creature and creator

Fri, 15/09/2006 - 09:55 -- James Oakley

Extremely helpful quotation.

(OK, I can't resist writing this: James reads David who quotes Barb listening to Lusk quoting Leithart)

http://davidpfield.blogspot.com/2006/09/baptism-and-covenant.html

In particular, I've never before seen the conceptual link between the covenant community / elect distinction and the creature / creator distinction. Thanks David for fishing these things out for us.

"God speaks through his spirit"

Wed, 13/09/2006 - 14:16 -- James Oakley

Before you say,... I know – these observations have been made before and are not new. But…

Here are two true statements:

  • God speaks through the Bible
  • God speaks through the Holy Spirit

I assume we wish to join the Eastern and Western churches throughout their history in affirming that the Spirit is one of the three persons, that the Spirit is divine, is God. If not, the implications are serious indeed – but it also makes the rest of this post redundant. Proceeding, then, on that assumption…

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Which came first, the wedding or the marriage

Thu, 07/09/2006 - 16:35 -- James Oakley

I’m often saddened when, in these days, weddings seems to matter more then marriage. (How encouraging, by contrast, to be helping one couple, who have recently become followers of Christ, to organise a wedding in the shortest possible time. They are keen to be married and are prepared to sacrifice lots of elements of “the ideal wedding”).

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2 Peter - the bare bones

Wed, 06/09/2006 - 17:41 -- James Oakley

Having flow charted 2 Peter, the main points stand out quite clearly from the subordinate ones.

Again – just in case this is helpful for anyone, here are two summaries of 2 Peter.

Summary

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Flow diagram of the text of 2 Peter

Wed, 06/09/2006 - 12:52 -- James Oakley

I’m doing some study of 2 Peter, and have prepared for myself a flow diagram of the English text. For those not familiar with flow diagrams, the idea is that the text is laid out to show the grammatical structure. Main clauses are placed against the left hand margin, and all dependent clauses are indented. Where it makes sense to do so, those dependent clauses are indented so as to place them directly beneath the word they depend on.

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