Updates, Kindling, and Creation

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Just a few notes for regular readers:

First, for the first time in six months, I have updated the Projects page of this blog, rectifying a number of frightful anachronisms.  Most of the changes are fairly minor updates, but one long-dormant project has been swept off the stage to make room for an exciting newly-hatched one.  Let me emphasize again that if you have interests in any of the areas described in these projects, I would love to hear from you and profit from your input.  The second project, the Mercersburg Theology Study Series, is at last nearing a significant milestone, as the first volume nears completion and we prepare to launch a website–a one-stop shop for all things Mercersburg.  Stay tuned for that.  In the meantime —

— Second, my book, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity, is now available on Kindle!  So if you’re an avid e-reader who’s interested in an idiosyncratic and unstable mix of Reformed theology, Hegelianism, and Anglo-Catholicism, go check it out! 😉

Third, my bandwidth-devouring series on English cathedrals that I visited last month will be drawing to an end with the lovely Wells Cathedral tomorrow, and I’ll at last begin posting the long-promised series from my friend, Brad Belschner, on Creation and Evolution (delayed till now due to the unfortunate theft of his laptop), which will give me the opportunity to focus almost wholly on some writing deadlines–though I’ll probably intersperse some themes of my own on familiar themes while the Creation series is ongoing.

5 thoughts on “Updates, Kindling, and Creation”

  3. Brad Littlejohn

    Thanks Brad, glad you thought so. In telling people about it, I've gotten responses ranging from "Thank God, what an answer to prayer!" to "Wikipedia? Oh come on now, get serious," or something rather like that. I certainly agree with Robert Song that it's really important and I hope we can make it happen.

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  4. Kent Will

    Neat stuff. So do you no longer hold to the opinions in your Mercersburg book? Just trying to peg things down in the constantly-shifting world of Reformed scholarship. 🙂

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  5. Brad Littlejohn

    Heh, thanks for asking. Well, that's a very sweeping and generalised question. No doubt, I still hold most of them, especially as I generally confined myself to historical judgments, which have changed very little–and inasmuch as they have changed, it has been due to learning more about the history of Mercersburg, not any theological paradigm shift, of course.As for my more theological evaluations and recommendations, it's also hard to say how much I'd disagree with from what's in the book, since when I wrote the book, I was conscious of hedging considerably, given that where I was at theologically at that time was, I knew, well out of step with the audience for which I was writing. So, although I disagree on some significant points with *what I thought when I was writing*, I don't how much that translates into disagreement with *what I actually wrote*. I'll have to re-read the book (or rather, "read" it for the first time, since I've never actually read it through since it became a book, strangely enough) to find out. And then I can publish an Augustinian retraction.One point on which I know I do differ–Nevin's theology of the ministry. In the book, I think I portray it as this wonderful bridgehead with Anglo-Catholicism. "Look, Nevin held a doctrine of ordination that was awfully similar to the Anglo-Catholics! Well this is nice–there's room for common ground between Anglican and Reformed!" Um, no. There is, I have subsequently discovered, plenty of room for common ground between Anglican and Reformed, but it lies in and depends on a forthright rejection of this essentially Roman doctrine of the ministry. I mean, as a strictly descriptive point, I wasn't that far off–Nevin's doctrine certainly is close to the Anglo-Catholic, and it is not completely out-of-step with High Church Presbyterianism (as D.G. Hart shows), so there is a point of contact between the two here. But as I am now convinced that that form of High Church Presbyterianism (and the corresponding High Church Anglicanism…though for some probably inconsistent reason, I still have more sympathy with the latter) is completely out-of-step with the Reformation, I wouldn't want to go in that direction. I still think apostolic succession is great, but whereas before I would've put it on the very high end of bene esse, right up near esse, now I'd put it on the lower end, well within the realm of adiaphora.

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