Well done, Moderator

The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has done a good job for us all today.

Responding to Stephen Hawkin's latest dismissal of God, John, our Moderator this year, has reaffirmed a Christian profession of God as Creator. You can read the Scotsman's report here. I read it in the Herald this morning, but their web site is so bad you can never find anything you want on it!

I notice the Scotsman have included some quotes from Scripture to end their piece, at least on line. There's one they missed out. The biblical definition of a fool is given in Ps 14:1

The fool says in his heart there is no God.

You can have as many degrees or professorships as you can bear, but if you deny the existence of God, you are a fool.

Another book on justification

Just finished another book from my 2010 target list. Mark A Seifrid Christ, our Righteousness: Paul's theology of justification, IVP, 2000.

Seifrid has obviously decided not to write an apologia, he is not in discussion with any of the new perspective school. Rather by setting forth plainly a reasonably traditional reformed view of justification in Paul he hopes to commend this to us.
He does a good job at this, certainly it is a better book than John Piper on Justification - see my earlier post here. In brief, Siefrid is at least concerned to be biblical, not just reformed.

I do think Seifrid's book fails in the lack of engagement with NT Wright. He is aware of Wright's work and seems at times to be kicking against Wright, without directly engaging him. Although Wright does merit 6 referneces in the index, these are all to minor comments or footnotes.

While helpful in its own way Seifrid's book does not advance the conversation on justification, and certainly will not draw it to any kind of conclusion.