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Chapter 4: Flesh

Chapter 2: The Physics of the Old Creation

Chapter 1: Atonement as Social Theory

Logic as a tool of theology.

Frame discusses language as a tool for theology and related subtopics.

Scripture as painting, Scripture as window, and Scripture as mirror.

Chapters 8 & 9

Chapter 7: I'm tired, boss.

Chapter 6

The Existential Justification of Knowledge

Gorman has hermeneutical gaps in his understanding of Revelation because he does not front the typological symbols of the Old Testament in his interpretation. This doesn't make his interpretation or points of application wrong necessarily, but it does lead him to an incomplete analysis and disordered emphases.

Chapter 4

The Situational Justification of Knowledge

Chapter 2 and Chapter 3

Prelude and Chapter 1

The Normative Justification of Knowledge

"Rationalism recognizes a need for criteria, or standards; empiricism a need for objective, publicly knowable facts; and subjectivism a need for our beliefs to meet our own internal criteria. A Christian epistemology will recognize all of those concerns but will differ from the rationalist, empiricist, and subjectivist schools of thought in important ways."

"Well into the twentieth century, ...religion was considered to be one of the principal binding forces that held a civilized society together. Church and state were separate institutions, but religion was not separate from the culture and political life of the nation. Government was expected to protect the rights of dissenters, but it was not expected to remain neutral with regard to religion."

The myth of "The Wars of Religion" has "a foundational importance for the secular West, because it explains the origin of its way of life and its system of governance. It is a creation myth for modernity." It "is also a soteriology, a story of our salvation from mortal peril."

Frame critiques rationalism, empiricism, and subjectivism, which are idolatries of the mind, the world, and the self, respectively.

Subjectivism does not work because one must believe in some kind of objective truth to function in life, including teaching subjectivism itself. The other two "objective" tendencies inevitably fall into hopeless subjectivism when trying to bridge the gap between "the one and the many."

Calvin and I are over halfway through!

"In making ethical decisions, we meet again the factors we have been discussing-the law, the situation, the self. Every ethical decision involves the application of a law (norm, principle) to a situation by a person (self)."

Cavanaugh traces the history of the word "religion" to show how it developed from the idea of "a binding duty" in the ancient world to mean "a unified system of metaphysical beliefs" (or something like this, there are over 50 different potential definitions, and that's part of the problem this chapter addresses) in the modern area.

The trick is to define it so as not to include secular "isms," which can't be done.