Covington High School Situation, a Few Thoughts

January 24, 2019 at 8:55 am (Culture, Hermeneutics, Racism)

The most ridiculous news story I have seen in a while took place over last weekend. It was ridiculous because it really shouldn’t have even been a story. No one got hurt, only words were exchanged. That didn’t stop the main-stream media (hereinafter MSM) from blowing the story so out of proportion that Salvator Dali would have to bow in defeat.

I have some thoughts. Firstly, MSM is completely and utterly incapable of telling unbiased news. Conservatives have known this for a long time. MSM allowed prejudice to blind them to the fundamental fact of interpretation: context is king. Context makes things more complex than first glances can fathom. MSM reporters are obviously either not being trained in elementary interpretation, or they are forgetting what they were taught. It doesn’t matter at this point whether the boys were perfect in their behavior. They almost certainly were not. Why, however, are the MSM and all those spewing out hate speech against these boys forgetting that these are teenage boys? Considering the fact that a hate group was spewing out filth against them, I thought they behaved with rather admirable restraint. When I was a teenager I had all the emotional empathy of a wooden block. While these boys may not have done the most admirable thing (but what would that have been, do pray tell?), they certainly did nothing worthy of the hate speech that has been spewed against them by intolerant, prejudiced MSM and others. If we were in the position of the boys, what would we have done? The boys couldn’t flee, since they were waiting for a bus. They didn’t want to hear the hate speech, so they started chanting their school song. They made no moves of physical aggression against anyone. All in all, pretty good discipline for teenage boys! Maybe one or two of them committed a micro-aggression. Why is that worse than what some of the people in the video were doing to them?

The MSM have forgotten (for a long time now) that there is always more than one side to a story. Since conservatives are no longer human, no longer to be given the benefit of human treatment, the conservative side of any story is ignored in the MSM. I don’t care about the MSM. I haven’t watched it in years. But I do care about the boys at Covington. And I do care about civil discourse in the nation. And the MSM still have the power to ruin people’s lives because they simply don’t care. More than that, they are guilty of far more hatred than Covington High School boys are.

I pity the MSM, actually. As the saying goes, there is no one so blind but the blind person who thinks he sees. And if there is any group of people who thinks it sees today, that group is MSM. If there is any group that simply does not see how much it is contributing to the hate in America, it is the MSM.

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Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology Considered Again

January 5, 2019 at 12:40 pm (Theological Encyclopedia)

We will take as our starting point the following well-known quotation from Vos’s Biblical Theology:

The fact is that Biblical Theology just as much as Systematic Theology makes the material undergo a transformation. the sole difference is in the principle on which the transformation is conducted. In the case of Biblical Theology this is historical, in the case of Systematic Theology it is of a logical nature. Each of these two is necessary, and there is no occasion for a sense of superiority in either. (Biblical Theology, p. 14).

What can plausibly be laid against this claim by Vos is that the Bible is more inherently historical than logical, and that therefore BT is a “better fit” than ST. Even if didactic portions of Scripture are acknowledged to be less historically organized than other portions (Proverbs comes to mind), the historical framework of the Bible still remains in place. What I wish to do is to answer this plausible objection.

Firstly, it is clear that certain portions of Scripture are less historically organized than others. Proverbs, for instance, is better organized topically than historically. It has been shown in some recent scholarship that Proverbs presupposes the historical covenants. Fair enough. I agree that Proverbs is not “secular” wisdom, but holy wisdom, however much certain parts of it might resemble Amenemope. However, the organization of the text itself is still better done topically. This means that making Proverbs undergo an historical transformation in order to fit BT categories would require a greater transformation than an ST treatment would.

What this means for the broader question is just this: BT might be a smaller transformation of historically organized texts than an ST treatment would represent. However, an ST treatment of other texts, like Proverbs, would represent a smaller transformation than BT would. In other words, genre differences are a factor in how much transformation a given text would undergo in BT or ST guise.

Secondly, ST is not somehow incapable of assimilating historical change into a logical locus. Surely, ST treats the locus of covenant theology with reference to the historical progression of the various iterations of the covenants! As Dr. Richard Gaffin once said, ST is like a plot analysis of a novel, and BT is like a plot summary. BT cannot ignore the logical relations entirely. Nor can ST ignore the historical progression of revelation. Each has to take the other into account. As a result, BT and ST must be completely interdependent, even while they can be distinguished.

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