Monday, September 12, 2005

Joe Carter on turtles

Evangelical Outpost nails a modern Credo to the Cyber-church door. I love the opening.

In his book A Brief History of Time, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking relates a story about a well-known scientist who gave a public lecture on astronomy: He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."


Joe Carter's Fifty Points isn't turtles, but it clearly represents one of the best-integrated summaries of Christian faith and thought I have seen lately. I'm still wondering about #39 but overall I don't find anything to quibble about.

It's a lot more digestible than the Machen essay referenced by JollyBlogger.
And check out JollyBlogger's notes on "grace grinding," a new term for me..."I have also heard it said that Calvinists are the only people in the world who can make the grace of God sound like bad news." Heh.

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