After taking a look at Mark Dever’s reading plan I decided to attempt to develop my own. Before beginning my MDiv work at Westminster, PA I spent a few years reading through Westminster’s recommended reading list. It was extremely beneficial to have a list of excellent books laid out for me in order to direct my learning. I believe a methodical reading plan is something all types of people can benefit from.
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As I typically use Saturdays to catch up on reading, I figured I would share some of the more interesting posts from this past week. This is a list of a few of this week’s top posts according to Castle Church:

• Jeff Downs lets us know about Revelation and Reason, a new collection of essays on reformed apologetics. The collection is edited by Scott Oliphint and Lane Tipton.
• Reformation Theology shares Spurgeon’s thoughts on limited atonement.
• Al Mohler lets us know there are no new heresies (The Secret included).
• Peter Leithart asks if the intention of the author determines the sense.
• Justin Taylor posts sections pertaining to the lusts of the flesh from David Powlison’s book Seeing with New Eyes.
• R. Scott Clark writes regarding John Calvin’s eschatology and what it means to be “reformed.”
• Doug Wilson talks about consumerism and markets.
• Finally, that old washed-up James White has been laid to rest.

I have developed what is called a “social bookmarking“¹ site for reformed theology at http://www.castlechurch.org. The whole idea is fairly progressive for reformed theology folk, but I think it has the potential to be something extremely useful. To speak plainly, Castle Church is sort of a living bibliography. Its purpose is to provide a space for people to collect, organize and share reformed resources from around the Internet. There is so much good content out there - it’s just hard to find and organize sometimes. Castle Church [along with the help of a community] will solve that problem.

What it Does

The site has a number of useful features, but perhaps the most useful and interesting is the blog aggregation. This is where I really have “scratched my own itch.” As many of you know, the blogosphere is full of decent reformed content. The problem is finding the really good stuff. Many people end up subscribing to 20+ RSS feeds just to keep tabs on what’s going on. They then end up getting flooded with posts they’ll never be able to read. Castle Church aggregates many reformed blogs - letting the community add new blogs that aren’t already being tracked.² As new posts are written to those blogs, they appear on Castle Church and the people of the community can then rate and tag the posts. This activity helps separate the wheat from the chaff. Basically, the community as a whole acts to pick out the good stuff. Community members can then just look at the main posts page or subscribe to an RSS feed in order to see the new stuff the community thought was worthwhile.³
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1. Many social bookmarking sites have popped up over the last few years such as digg and del.icio.us, however, I am unaware of any sites dealing with reformed theology.↩
2. This is an interesting way to publicize your own blog. By having Castle Church track your blog, you are exposing it to many more potential readers.↩
3. Of course one may still look at everything.↩

I have just begun reading Vern Poythress’ new book Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach and have thoroughly enjoyed it thus far. Dr.² Poythress has a unique background (having PhDs in both theology and mathematics) which provides an interesting perspective on the subject matter. What is perhaps the most attractive aspect of this book is the Van Tillian approach Poythress takes. We would not have to strain ourselves to find a dearth of books discussing the relationship of Christianity to science, however it would be substantially more difficult to find many exploring the same relationship using a transcendental/presuppositional framework.

Poythress employs the transcendental method by listing several divine attributes that are found in scientific laws. His intent is to show the unbelieving scientist their presupposing of the Christian God of the Bible. Poythress moves from the more obvious attributes of omnipresence and eternity to more objectionable (at least to unbelievers) attributes such as personality and goodness. Poythress successfully demonstrates (in albeit abbreviated form) the necessity of the Christian God of the Bible for conducting scientific inquiry.¹
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1. Or as Van Til would say: “By the impossibility of the contrary.”↩

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made its course material available through the OpenCourseWare Consortium at http://ocw.mit.edu/. Currently, the multimedia offerings are lacking, but lecture notes and readings have been posted for every MIT course.

Matthew Mason at Mother Kirk has written an interesting post regarding whether the imputation of Christ’s active obedience can be used as a litmus test for the label “reformed.” He cites none other than John Owen as an historical example. The post seems to have been prompted by Westminster West’s recent publication Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry. Doug Wilson, who does defend the imputation of Christ’s active obedience, does not defend the doctrine as a sine qua non of Reformed orthodoxy. As I recall, Carl Trueman has lectured on John Owen and his thoughts regarding the doctrine. In the lecture, Trueman entertains a discussion about the Westminster Assembly. If my memory serves me correctly, there is some debate regarding the number of Westminster Assembly members who subscribed to the imputation of Christ’s active obedience. Though I would firmly uphold the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s active obedience, I cannot see that it can [in any historical sense] be called a “sine qua non of Reformed orthodoxy.”

I was recently directed to Wikipedia’s page that contains a list of unsolved problems in philosophy. I thought I would provide the link for all the ambitious philosophers out there. The “unsolved problems” listed under epistemology are especially interesting. Wikipedia also has a page linking to lists in other disciplines.

3.0 Jonathan Edwards’ Doctrine of the Trinity
3.1 The Trinity in Edwards’ Overall Theology

Jonathan Edwards was a Trinitarian idealist.¹ That is, his philosophical idealism was developed in order to serve his Trinitarian theology. This philosophical tendency can be seen in his musings on “Of Being” and “The Mind”² which appear to be much like his other musings in the “Miscellanies” and in “The End For Which God Created the World.”³ A major element in idealism was the notion that being must be perceived to be. Addressing the question of the possible existence of nothing, Edwards writes,

And how it doth grate upon the mind, to think that something should be from all eternity, and nothing all the while be conscious of it. Let us suppose, to illustrate it, that the world had a being from all eternity, and had many great changes and wonderful revolutions, and all the while nothing knew; there was no knowledge in the universe of any such thing. How is it possible for the mind to imagine? Yea, it is really impossible it should be, and nothing know it. Then you’ll say, if it be so, it is because nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness. No, certainly nowhere else, but either in created or uncreated consciousness.⁴

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1. This is the helpful expression of Stephen R. Holmes in God of Grace & God of Glory.↩
2. These can be found in Edwards’ Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 202 - 207 and 332 - 393.↩
3. “This can be found as the first of the “Two Dissertations” in Edwards’ Ethical Writings, 401 - 536. Stressing Edwards’ idealism is no way meant to underplay or deny his concern for redemptive history. His idealism was simply the metaphysic that under girded his theology. His philosophy was always in service to his theology. In fact, Edwards’ idealism was learned from Christian sources (Nicholas Malebranche, Henry More and the other Cambridge Platonists and John Locke) and was adopted and adapted by him to oppose the materialism of such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes. For more on this see Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and Its British Context and its companion volume, Moral Philosophy at Sixteenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition . See also Wallace E. Anderson’s fine introduction to the Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 53 -143. To affirm that Edwards’s idealism was in service to his theology and that he learned it from Christian sources does not, of course, by itself, justify his embracing it. It is questionable whether idealism is useful as a Christian metaphysic.↩
4. “Of Being,” Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 203 - 204. See also George Rupp, “The ‘Idealism” of Jonathan Edwards.” (Harvard Theological Review 62 [April 1969]), 209 - 226.↩

2.2 The Doctrine of the Human Soul

2.2.1 Preliminary Remarks

Jonathan Edwards, of course, did not deal with the nature of the human soul de novo or in a vacuum, but stood within a particular tradition (albeit with the additional help of more contemporary philosophical influences) regarding the make-up of the various powers of human nature. Perry Miller discussed the context of the discussion about the nature of the human soul in his The New England Mind,¹ but more recently Norman Fiering has dealt with the same issue at length in two major studies,² where he cogently demonstrates that Edwards, while a brilliant thinker, was no lone genius in a barren wilderness. Nor was Edwards simply a straightforward disciple of John Locke. Edwards was conversant in the major Continental philosophical discussions of his day (which, of course included such men as Locke and Newton).
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1. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954).↩
2. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) and its companion volume Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).↩

Conclusion

How Plantinga Misses the Point

So how, then, does this apparent lack of historical context effect Plantinga’s use of Edwards? Plantinga seems to be unaware of Edwards’ effort to transcend faculty psychology with its hierarchical valuation or gradation of the faculties. He seems to not know that Edwards was trying to walk a middle road between the two extremes of rationalism and enthusiasm that valued one of the powers to the detriment of the other. Or, if he is aware of it, perhaps he disagrees with Edwards or finds him unconvincing or misguided. How would Edwards come across that way if he isn’t already being read through the lens of faculty psychology, as he surely was in the eyes of Charles Chauncey?

Plantinga does seem to read Edwards as a sort of intellectualist with the priority of the intellect in the workings of true affections. That would be true, after a fashion, as long as it is understood that Edwards was trying to move away from faculty psychology although not away from making legitimate distinctions of the powers of the human soul. We can speak of a “priority” of the intellect as long as that priority is understood in terms of taxis or functional order and not primacy of importance. Plantinga also seems to equate the affections with emotions, although this connection is not always clear or hard-and-fast. On the related matter, Plantinga recognizes that sin, for instance, can be understood as blindness, as a not seeing God or the great things of the gospel as the truly lovely things they are. But sin is also a willful blindness. It is a hatred of the loveliness of God and his attributes. We are responsible for our failure to see. We can distinguish the powers of the soul, but we can’t separate them. Nor ought we to consider the intellect or the will more important than the other. After all. God made us with both. Admittedly sin has wreaked its havoc in this area just as it has in others. We sinful human beings tend to prize one power of the soul over another. We still struggle with the same extremes Edwards faced.
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