Of the Way

“The Bible refers repeatedly to the reality of dragons and winged serpents and indicates that the devil is one of their number.  Modern translators are embarrassed by all of this and try to get by with renderings like jackel or crocodile.  They have not gone so far as to translate the words for dragon as export or drain, but they would if they could.”

-Douglas Wilson, Future Men, Canon Press, 2001, p. 100, emphasis original

I had to read this book for my Historical Theology class and present on Augustine as I did on Athanasius.  (The outline of that lecture can be found here.)  Augustine’s work provides a solid basis for “plundering the Egyptians” and appropriating the best of classical learning for the cause of the gospel, including an extended discussion of rhetoric.  Augustine ably defends the Christian appropriation of the useful techniques and elements of classical rhetoric.  In addition, Augustine discusses signs and symbols and lays out a hermeneutical framework for Biblical interpretation that was tremendously influential on Western Biblical interpretation.  Grade: A

“Throughout history, the Christian Church has had to guard against the heresy of gnosticism.  Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of defined beliefs.  Rather, gnosticism is a tendency: the tendency to replace the historic facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas.  Gnosticism is the tendency to de-historicize and de-physicalize the Christian religion.  Gnosticism transforms history into ideology and facts into philosophy.  Gnosticism tends to see religion as man’s reflections about God and reality instead of as God’s revelation of Himself and His Word to man.  As a tendency, Gnosticism has always plagued the Church, and it is alive and well today, openly in “liberalism,” and in a more concealed fashion, in “evangelicalism.”

-James Jordan, Creation in Six Days, Canon Press, 1999, p. 71, emphasis original

Note: Chapter 4 “Gnosticism Versus History” should be required reading for every Protestant.  Protestantism went dangerously gnostic in the nineteenth century, and we’re still trying to recover.  See my earlier comments from my review of Holiness by Ryle.