So, How's It Coming?

Are you catching up? I'm still about a week behind in my reading, having completed chapter 10 of Book I this morning. According to our reading schedule, we should be in the middle of chapter 13. Ah, well. That's what we get for starting late. I hope to get the blogs up to the reading over the next couple of weeks, but just wanted to give you all a word of encouragement. Don't fall into the trap of viewing this quest in some kind of legalistic fashion. The goal is not to finish. The goal is attained in the journey itself. And if you haven't yet made the progress you might have hoped, that's ok. Keep going. I have found it to be well worth the effort.

Have you noticed, yet, how so much of what he writes sounds as if he's addressing issues facing us today? Consider just a couple of statements from my reading this morning.

"I know what certain rascals bawl out in corners in order to display the keenness of their wit in assailing God's truth. For they ask, 'Who assures us that the books that we read under the names of Moses and the prophets were written by them? They even dare to question whether there was a Moses. Yet, if anyone were to call in doubt whether there ever was a Plato, an Aristotle, or a Cicero, who would not say that such folly ought to be chastised with the fist or the lash?"

The higher critics of the 18th and 19th centuries thought themselves to be innovators, but the challenges to the Scriptures they were putting forth were nothing new. Calvin was dealing with them in the 16th century. And how did he refute them? He used the same kind of argumentation that most of our contemporaries think people like Josh McDowell came up with.

Does the following sound familiar?

"Furthermore, those who, having forsaken Scripture, imagine some way or other of reaching God, ought to be thought of as not so much gripped by error as carried away with frenzy. For of late, certain giddy men have arisen who, with great haughtiness exalting the teaching office of the Spirit, despise all reading and laugh at the simplicity of those who, as they express it, still follow the dead and killing letter."

It is not difficult to hear a critique of some aspects of the charismatic movement and neo-orthodoxy in those words. Solomon is once again proved true...there is nothing new under the sun.

Don't be daunted. There's good stuff up ahead!