James's Weblog

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!]

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

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.

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…

Thanks to Chris Green and Dick Lucas in their BST commentary on 2 Peter for the following paragraph. 2 Peter 2 really is frighteningly contemporary in the scenario it describes.

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”).

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

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.

Many thanks to Peter Davies, vicar at Audley for his permission to reproduce this morning’s sermon here. Very helpful, I thought, for how clearly he put things. Echoes of Rich Lusk at one point – which certainly is not a criticism!

I have to say that this familiar passage is such a shock to the system.

I could be misconstrued as Binitarian in my recent entry on the Independent “Good List”.

Just to clarify: