By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:26:08 +0000

It is also interesting to note that the entire focus of Piper's quote was God and the entire focus of your post was man.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:08:55 +0000

Good job Roger, you're doing your homework 😉
Ken, I'm sorry you missed the point of Piper's quote and instead used it as a means to trumpet your own thoughts.
“The poor academic quality we see from Christian schools and seminaries today is primarily a result of the problematic status of knowledge created by Reformed thought such as Piper's”
If only Christian schools would teach from a Reformed perspective…
Piper constantly, and well above most preachers, emphasizes the essential role of reason in our relationship with Christ. He does no such thing as downplay reason, but rather shows how finite our work is. His point here is simply to show us that, although very important, man's thoughts are nothing compared to God's.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:09:40 +0000

That's a beautiful statement.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:24:39 +0000

This is a wonderful quote of Piper's that, because of it's clarity, invites a clear contrast to be made between reformed thought and the traditional thought of the Catholic Church (not that we need to choose, but each has important points to make). Piper's view of scholarship as the achievement of tiny chirps with which man is impressed places such a chasm of intelligibility between human reason and divine things that one wonders what the purpose of God-given reason is. Such dismissals of reason don't necessarily follow at all from Piper's scripture references. It seems that a doctrine of God's immanence within creation, an immanence that is knowable through reason and revelation, can account for the whole of scripture.
What of Romans 1:20, for example, “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
What I love in Reformed thought is the call to not be so blinded by the immanence of God (described philosophically as the analogical senses of being, “being is spoken of in many ways”) that one misses God himself. God's immanence is like the heat of a fire we feel via creation, but we shouldn't miss the fire for the warmth! And this is an incredibly important warning, and one that has gone unheeded by several Scholastics and neo-Scholastics.
But when we reduce reason to tiny chirps we are not only outside of Scripture, we make problematic the idea of Christian education. The question of Christian education today is, “How does being a Christian affect {field of study}?”, when it should be, “How can I do better at {field of study}?”. This is why John Paul II's surprising instructions to philosophers in Faith and Reason wasn't to consider Scripture, but to become better philosophers. The poor academic quality we see from Christian schools and seminaries today is primarily a result of the problematic status of knowledge created by Reformed thought such as Piper's, and has led to a situation in which Christians can get PhDs and be considered educated without ever having read Aquinas, let alone Aristotle and Plato, or the corresponding canons of any non-Western tradition. As Willard has been telling us, things aren't true because they are in Scripture, they are in Scripture because they are true.

Comments on: The Proper Context for Theological Scholarship

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