B.M Palmer, Theology of Prayer, ch. 5
Once the duty of prayer has been established in its own right, no number of objections can militate decisively against it. B.M. Palmer writes:-
…Truth is not to be weighed in a pair of scales balancing duty against difficulty, as though the one can be cancelled by the other; for no positive duty can be dislodged, until the evidence on which it rests shall be itself swept away.
Craig Blomberg is Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary. He’s the author of a number of fine books, including one on the Historical Reliability of the Gospels and another on the The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel.
I was interested to read this recent interview with Blomberg on Justin Taylor’s blog, Between Two Worlds.
Blomberg shows that the kind of approach to the inerrancy question that James Orr was advocating a century ago is still, thankfully, alive and kicking.…
B.M Palmer, Theology of Prayer, ch 4
That prayer is a universal duty is seen in the following:-
1. The express command of God
I noted in an earlier post that debate about the inerrancy of Scripture has been sharper in North America than in Britain. This is due to a considerable extent to the contrasting views taken by the Princeton theologians in America and their British counterparts. Now, I love the Princeton theologians – B.B. Warfield is a special favourite of mine – but I continue to have a few problems with the concept of inerrancy.
One of the leading scholars on the British side was the Scot, James Orr (1844-1913). …
Confession and supplication together form the language of guilt, with which we must all approach the Almighty.
If man’s first duty is obedience to God’s law, then, having transgressed the law, his first responsibility is to repent and confess.…
The Post-Evangelical is entitled ‘Let Me Tell You a Story’. This chapter deals with the failure of modern, and the rise of the postmodern, ‘stories’.
What is the new postmodern world that is emerging?
…It is a world which understands itself through biological rather than mechanistic models; a world where people see themselves as belonging to the environment, rather than over it or apart from it; a world distrustful of institutions, hierarchies, centralized bureaucarcies and male dominated organizations.
B.M Palmer begins chapter 2 of Theology of Prayer by suggesting that the parts of prayer are like the colours of the spectrum: they have a basic unity and merge into each other.
Adoration and praise are scarcely distinguishable. Adoration has more to do with God’s nature; praise with his works. In adoration we view God in himself, as revealed to us in the glorious proportions of his own nature and being; in praise we view him in the operation of his will, displayed piece by piece in what he does.…
In chapter 5 – ‘Woolly Liberals?’ – Dave Tomlinson informs us that he shares with evangelicals a rejection of theological liberalism. But what he does not share are evangelicals’ reasons for opposing liberalism.
Indeed, he expresses amazement at ‘how paranoid evangelicals are about liberalism’. Evangelicals are constantly patrolling their boundaries, lest one of their number should trespass into liberal territory.
This is not to suggest, says Tomlinson, that theology and doctrine are unimportant:
…‘Far from it; but there is no evidence from the Bible that it is (sic) of ultimate importance.
Some time ago, I introduced B.M. Palmer’s book Theology of Prayer. I now begin a series of posts summarising this ‘neglected masterpiece’ chapter by chapter.
Chapter 1 is entitled, Prayer: Its Nature.
Combining the wording of the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms gives the following definition of prayer:-
…Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God for all things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, by the help of his Spirit, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgement of his mercies.
Dan Brown’s The Dan Vinci Code is well past its sell-by date now. But it has given wings to a fanciful myth about Christian origins which had being crawling around in the academic world in the US and elsewhere but has now, thanks to Brown’s book, nested in the public consciousness.
What is this myth? The redoubtable New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, in the course of a lecture given in 2005 which exposes the sillinesses of the above-mentioned book, outlines the five elements of the Myth of Christian Origins:-
1. …
