Linkage

Just a few snippets from other people's thoughts that I think you ought to see...

Chris has some intriguing analysis of humanism here.  He and I are looking at things from very different perspectives in lots of ways, but I think this is spot on.  In particular, "there are fantastically hard - but interesting - dialogues that need to be pursued - our relationship to a web of deterministic natural causes, our relationship to the drives of our own bodies, and our relationship to the ecosystem around us, to name but three. Yet, these dialogues occur, or can only be driven forward through tension. Humanism, I would argue, whether it turns us into little gods or capacious animals, erases this tension. It pretends the questions have been answered."  Have a read.

Krish Kandiah reviews Wayne Grudem's book Politics According to the Bible.  With a title like that it was always going to be controversial.  I think Krish goes to the heart of the issue, which is Grudem's hermeneutic. Proof-texting and a naive understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture can get you into all sorts of trouble.  Perhaps we only see how much trouble when we move into an immediately and obviously controversial area like politics, where our cultural bias starts to really show through.  Krish concludes on one section of the book "there is very little theology here, just a prooftext and some statistics."  I wonder how often that could be said of evangelical theological writing.

Oh, and British Universities are a breeding ground for extremism.  So watch out.