Last Note from the Tilt-A-Whirl!

Nathan Wilson quotes Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, then he invents an instructive dialogue between two students evaluating it:

Kant’s categorical imperative: Act only according to maxims which you can desire to be universal.

Student One: That doesn’t make sense. It’s a cheapened golden rule. Without a creating God imposing it, it’s entirely arbitrary. Logic can’t give you goodness, just validity. And if it could, how would a “rational” law achieve any actual authority in an accidental world?

Student Two rebuts: Think about bicycle theft. What if everyone stole bicycles?

Student One: We’d all have someone else’s bicycle.

—N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl

Can’t Stop Tilting

Nathan Wilson feels sorry for the philosopher who urged the good riddance of the weak, only to end up deranged himself, cared for by his sister:

I have never been irritated by Nietzsche, never annoyed. At his most blasphemous, at his most riotously hateful and pompous, I have only ever been able to laugh. But even then, there is something bittersweet about the laughter. I know his story. I know how his bluff was called, how he was broken. Again from The Anti-Christ: “The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.” Spake the paralytic. The man fed with a spoon by those who loved him. “What is more harmful than any vice—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity. . . .” And yet, because I see the world through my eyes and not his, I have sympathy for Nietzsche himself. Bodies and minds are not all that can be botched in a man. Souls can be hollow, twisted, thrashing.

—N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl

BibleWorks and Your Hundreds of Hours Studying Greek

Rod Decker’s blog is definitely a must-subscribe for those who love the Greek New Testament.

I strongly amen the note he plays in this post, the same note played (on a saxophone, in this case) by Con Campbell, someone who is also very serious about Greek.

The upshot: BibleWorks and Logos give, and they take away.

1Marks Interview Series

At this year’s very enjoyable BJU Seminary retreat at the Wilds, Dr. Robert Bell kindly agreed to sit for the first interview in what I hope to make a series, the 1Marks Interview Series. (While other ministries can afford to hire multiple Marks, βλογάπη has only one, and he actually pays to work here.)

I apologize for the somewhat low audio quality; I made the mistake of adjusting the laptop (on loan from Grace & Knowledge) on two or three occasions, and loud, unpleasant sounds on the recording were the result! I have since purchased a nicer microphone to help with other work I do, so future sessions should be greatly improved!

Here are some of the questions I asked Dr. Bell:

• How far along are you in your OTT? What does your beard have to do with it?
• How would you summarize your approach to biblical theology, especially as it relates to systematic theology?
• Whose approach has been most influential for you in this area?
• What do you think of Bruce Waltke’s OTT?
• Do you think fundamentalism needs more scholars?
• Do you think Bible software has overall increased your productivity or decreased it?
• I recently read David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers.* His thesis is that media have shaped incoming seminary students by vastly decreasing their ability to interpret texts. Have you personally noticed such a decrease over your decades teaching?

*The questions I asked Dr. Bell actually contained no hyperlinks.

Pistis Faith

This entire post is balderdash. Though the Scripture verses certainly stand, the scaffolding I’ve erected around them is made of store-brand Q-tips.

But I’ve got a purpose in it all. This post should be like the definition of metaphor I once read: you take two things and place them close together, hoping that a spark will jump across the gap and illuminate them both. But I’m not telling you what the other thing is! You’ll have to guess! The guess will create the spark!

So let’s see some comments. What’s the point of my balderdash? Can anyone make it even balder? What’s the main thing I’m trying to illuminate? Only regular readers will likely figure it out…

•       •       •

"When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8 NASB)

The Greek word underlying the term "faith" in this verse is pistis, a word that denotes a faith in Christ without any modicum of physical sight. Pistis faith is a rich, doctrinal faith, because it’s the word Jude uses when he talks about "the faith once delivered to the saints." Faith, in fact, is not mere belief; it is doctrine.

"Faith" here is also not mere "trust." "Trust" (in Greek, peitho) is something anyone can have, Christian or not, because it is something based on evidence available to one’s physical sight. It was easy for Israel to "trust" in the military help of Egypt, for example, because Egypt’s army was a tangible entity that they could view with their own eyes (2 Kings 18:20–21, LXX). This kind of trust is a persuasion based on evidence. It is not saving, pistis faith.

Christians "walk by faith"—pistis faith—and "not by sight" (2 Cor 5:7). And pistis faith is something that only God’s children can have, because only they know the doctrine which pistis faith entails.

For example, when several men brought to Jesus a paralytic to be healed, He "saw their faith (pistis)," and He responded by saying, "Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven." Jesus would not forgive the sins of someone who merely trusted in or was persuaded by the visible evidence that Jesus was a healer. The men who brought their friend to Jesus had pistis faith; they knew enough doctrine about Jesus—that He was Messiah, come to save them from their sins—that Jesus knew they had saving faith, doctrinal faith, pistis faith.

This is why Paul in Ephesians 2:8 can say that we are saved "through faith." Pistis faith is absolutely essential for salvation. Mere evidence-based "trust" alone would never be enough to save someone. And this verse reveals something else important about pistis faith: it is “a gift,” something divine in origin.

Without pistis faith, it is impossible to please God, says Hebrews 11:6. And that verse adds something very important to our understanding. It says that pistis faith is "necessary" (Greek: dei). The world is happy to "trust" in what it sees, but it is necessary for Christians to have doctrinal faith without sight, pistis faith.

*Stay tuned for the next post in this series, “Elpis Hope.”*