Tad's Life

OK. I've got notes for various posts sitting around here waiting for me to be sufficiently energetic to write them up and I'll get to them, Lord willing, soon. But Gene and Cheryl brought some of my books with them when they came from Charlotte last week with the team and among them is First Theology by Kevin Vanhoozer. I finished a disappointing re-read of "The Giver" and decided to pull out one of the big tomes I bought to pursue my personal education in theology.

Much to my surprise, I sped through the first chapter, thoroughly enjoying myself. And even more shocking, Mr. Vanhoozer keeps slipping in funny stuff. And that's hard to do in the deep philosophical and epistemological waters he was crossing! He ends that first chapter with this reworking of I Corinthians 13:

If I speak with the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum. And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual systems of theology, so as to remove liberal objections, and have not personal hope in God, I am nothing. And if I give myself to resolving the debate between supra and infralapsarianism, and to defending inerrancy, and to learning the Westminster Catechism, yea, even the larger one, so as to recite it by heart backwards and forwards, and have not love, I have gained nothing.

Sorry. I think it was the "yea, even the larger one" that caused me to guffaw out loud even though Jean and his buddy were here doing some plumbing. I just had to share that.

And, yes, I have no idea either what infralapsarianism is!!