Tom Ascol continues his response to Dr. Steve Lempke’s paper here, here, and here. The substance of Ascol’s response looks good. But I would add that not only are we required to represent our opponents’ views accurately (as Ascol argues), but we must also engage them with a winsome and humble spirit. To that end, I hope that we can have more of an irenic tone in this debate. “The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome e, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition . . .†-2 Timothy 2:24-25
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Advice for the Debate
Calvinists would do well to heed John Piper’s advice on how to engage the debate that I wrote about in my last post. His wise words appear in a little piece called “How to Teach and Preach ‘Calvinism.’â€
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Southern Baptists and Calvinism
The conversation concerning Calvinism continues among Southern Baptists. At least that is a part of Steve Lemke’s aim in an April 2005 paper titled “The Future of Southern Baptists as Evangelicals†(pp. 12-17). Among other things, Lemke makes the controversial suggestion that the Calvinism outlined in the popular acrostic TULIP amounts to hyper-Calvinism (p. 14). He writes, “While we all know five point Calvinists who are effective evangelists and missionaries, it is a common intuition that those with a theology of hard Calvinism are not apt to be as evangelistic as others†(p. 16). Lemke is the Provost of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Joe Thorn responds to Lemke’s essay…
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Understanding the Blogs
In his daily blog on OpinionJournal.com, James Taranto brings our attention to a useful little essay by Steven Den Beste. In the essay, Den Beste says that all blogs fall into one of two basic categories. He writes: “Blogs are as different as the people who write them, but you’ll find two fundamental themes, with each blog being somewhere on the axis of how much of each appears. For lack of better terms, I suppose you could refer to them as ‘editors’ and ‘writers’. “One form of blog is the ‘informal portal’. The general idea is to find cool stuff, link to it, and perhaps add a few words describing…
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Human Trafficking
For interested readers, Heide Metcaf is doing a five-part series about Human Trafficking on the Common Grounds Online blog.
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What Do They Know That We Don’t?
At first blush, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court looks like a welcome development. All indications are that he is an originalist in his approach to constitutional interpretation—that is, he believes the constitution to have a fixed meaning grounded in the original intention of the framers. Yet it also looks like Roberts fits the description of a so-called “establishment conservativeâ€â€”meaning, he will show some degree of deference to the traditions of the high court. To this effect, Time magazine speculates: “Roberts may agree in spirit with those who see the past 50 years of jurisprudence as too expansive and too intrusive but respect too much the way…
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New Plame Memo: A Big Splash at the Washington Post?
The headline of a story in today’s Washington Post reads “Plame’s Identity Marked As Secret.†The first paragraph of the story goes on to state the following: “A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked ‘(S)’ for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified.†At first blush, this information looks very damning for Karl Rove. It’s the kind of headline that makes a really big splash on the front page of a newspaper. Yet one finds critical qualifications buried in the text of…
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Bush’s Man: John Roberts
Well, he’s not a woman like many were speculating. But John Roberts looks pretty good anyway. Here’s the watershed quote from a brief Roberts co-wrote in 1990: “We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled . . . the Court’s conclusions in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion and that government has no compelling interest in protecting prenatal human life throughout pregnancy find no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution†(source). Some news outlets are already citing remarks that Judge Roberts made in 2003 in his confirmation hearing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District…
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Looks like it’s not Edith Clement
ABC News reports that Edith Clement received a phone call from the White House saying that she would not be the President’s nominee. Here’s the link to the story.
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SCOTUS Scuttlebutt
SCOTUS Scuttlebutt I won’t pretend that I know who the President’s nominee will be to the Supreme Court. But I have been following the educated guesses of the pundits in the press. The scuttlebutt is that Bush will nominate a woman who is an originalist. Among those who might fit that description and who are likely candidates: Edith Jones Edith Brown Clement Priscilla Owen Janice Rogers Brown Karen Williams Alice Batchelder Mary Anne Glendon Lillian R. BeVier John S. Shannon Maura D. Corrigan (Sources: Bill Kristol’s article and MSNBC’s list of prospective nominees.) The Washington Post and MSNBC have pages that give information on many of these prospects. Some of…