Peter Leithart takes Pete Enns to school on reader-response criticism:
Enns is correct to emphasize that the Bible doesn’t function like an owners’ manual. Proverbs more often proposes riddles than it gives simple pious advice. Still, Paul says that the Scripture is useful for training the man of God for “every good work,” so there must be something owner-manualish about the Bible.
These are old arguments, not to be resolved in a blog review. What’s most interesting about Enns’s book is his self-positioning as a defender of Scripture. This isn’t new either. Others have taken up the task of defending the Bible from the fundamentalist hordes. Enns does it cleverly. The Bible doesn’t act the way we want it to, so we have a choice: “either change our expectations to conform to what is actually in the Bible or find some way to force the Bible into our mold” (76). He claims to be doing the former, and his “unsettled faith is a maturing faith” (238). Enns’s critics are pre-classified as immature, fearful abusers of Scripture who want to press the Bible into their own modern molds. At that point, it’s difficult to know how a debate can continue.
Old Life 
That’s a pretty sweet picture of Maravich but I can think of way to make it better:
http://goo.gl/5ChIGS
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And that picture makes it a three-pete.
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My wife’s cousin was a student manager for Maravich’s high school team in Raleigh and spent hours rebounding and kicking it back to him while he shot and shot and shot. What a privilege.
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cw, it never gets old, does it?
But my wife loves that image. I’m glad the cat looks embarrassed.
And I am the cat whisperer.
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Glad it brightens the otherwise dreary life of Mrs. Darryl — making you coffee and darning your socks, etc.
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Battle of the Pete’s, photos of cat whisperers, talk of happy wives, and all under the banner of entry was posted in Scripture and Prolegomena and tagged fundamentalism, modernism, Pete Enns, Peter Leithart?
Never old at Oldlife, indeed.
PS I need to go polish my clubs.
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cw, darning something anyway.
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“He claims to be doing the former, and his ‘unsettled faith is a maturing faith'”
Is this like the girl in the backseat with her panties around her ankles who is “exploring monogamy”?
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Leithart: “Enns’s critics are pre-classified as immature, fearful abusers of Scripture who want to press the Bible into their own modern molds. At that point, it’s difficult to know how a debate can continue.”
Yes, no wonder other debates haven’t gone so well. There’s plenty of pre-classifying of confessional Reformed folks as all kinds of things when we’re talking FV or Reformational Catholicism.
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Leithart critiquing Enns … kinda like the blind leading the blind
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You got that right, RGM. Check out his little band of collared doctrinal deviants:
http://trinityhouseinstitute.com/fellows/
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Sometimes Leithart favors law as gospel, and Christian plumbers.
Paul says that the Scripture is useful for training the man of God for “every good work,” so there must be something owner-manualish about the Bible.
But sometimes Leithart leans 2k:
Campbell’s charge that the ethics of Justification theory is incoherent is also unconvincing. The incoherence comes from having “two different sets of ethical instructions from God” (42), one for Israel and the other for everyone else. “As a matter of strict justice,” Caampbell writes, “a prohibition (or a positive commandment) cannot be valid for one group but simultaneously invalid for another. Such a dual system is incoherent in terms of content. There is really no such thing as an optional right action prescribed by God” (42).
Leithart—But this runs up against the rather massive evidence of the Bible, which indicates precisely that God gives different commands to different groups. Priests are under stricter rules than the rest of Israel, and Israel under stricter rules than the nations. A Gentile could worship Yahweh and yet remain uncircumcised; Jewish parents who neglected to circumcise their male children, however, were cut off from the covenant. Rules differed depending on how near someone was to the house of God, depending on his priestly status.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2014/09/justification-theory
different laws, different gospels, since law is gospel….
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Cw, how impressive that 5 out of 7 of these “fellows” have past or present associations with the PCA.
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Yes, Tony, to our great shame – – like a rural family with sons who burn barns .
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Have you noticed CW…they all look the same? Must be something in the grape juice.
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A leitharted bunch.
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