Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Lived Theology
The drama of doctrine is about refining the dross of textual knowledge into the gold of Christian wisdom by putting one’s understanding of the Scriptures into practice. Like medicine, doctrinal truth is of no use unless it is apporpriated. But how ought one to take doctrine? Intellectual assent is not enough; doctrine needs to capture…
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Piper and McKnight’s Agreement
Not long ago John Piper wrote a book with a rather quirky title that I think gets to the heart of what we arguing in this book. His book was called God is the Gospel. Here’s what he meant: “The highest, best, final, decisive good of the gospel, without which no other gifts would be…
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Blog Series Update
As part of my trek through BlogX, I’m rearranging how I do blog series. Rather than have a landing page with descriptions of each of the series, I’m going to make a post for each series which will function like a table of contents and be updated as the series moves along. This is what…
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Philosopher as Theologian
It should be clear that the dichotomy between philosophy and theology is a false one. They are indeed two distinct disciplines, but they are not mutually exlcusive and do not operate in hermetically sealed compartments, in principle and in practice isolated from each other. The Christian philosopher must then develop an understanding of how the…
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From Gospel to Plan of Salvation
The gospel, I am arguing, is declaring the Story of Israel as resolved in the Story of Jesus. That was Paul’s gospel, and it was the apostolic gospel tradition, and that gospel shaped everything in the church until the Reformation, at which time that gospel was slightly shift and eventually – and it took the…
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Mew: And The Glass Handed Kites
[This post is part of the College: Alphabetized by Album series] I’m not sure where I first heard of Mew, but sometime early 2007 I picked up their album And The Glass Handed Kites. Some people may be put off by the foreign-ness of Mew (they’re Danish) as often their lyrics do not translate well…
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Epistemology as a Christian Activity
But Christianity has seen itself since its inception as a knowledge tradition, not opinion of unfounded belief. Words for “know” and “knowledge” occur more than 2000 times in the Bible, and are prevalent as well in the writings of the church fathers, the apologists and later theologians. For some two thousand years Christians have taken…
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An Animated History of the English Language
Having renamed the site “Words With Nate,” it’s only appropriate that I share this. For those of you who don’t have time to read Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue, or Made in America, this is for you: [tentblogger-youtube r9Tfbeqyu2U] You can watch it here, but you may want to just click through so you can…
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The Gospel Isn’t The Plan of Salvation?
It may strike you as uncommonly odd for me to make this claim, but I’m going to say it anyway: this Plan of Salvation is not the gospel. The Plan of Salvation emerges from the Story of Israel/Bible and from the Story of Jesus, but the plan and the gospel are not the same big…
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The Purpose of Philosophy
Doing philosophy as a Christian means doing philosophy under the authority of the Lord Jesus and of the Bible, the Word of God. It means reasoning within the bounds of religion. It means, in the end, doing pihilosophy in a way that aims intentionally at the ultimate goal of personal transformation into the image of…
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