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[Also on Substack]

My friend, analytical philosopher extraordinaire William Vallicella, Ph.D., answered the question, “Why am I bothering to read [Christian apologist Cornelius] Van Til?”

I urge my reader to read Bill’s answer. Since I can’t comment on his Substack, I’ll venture an answer on mine: he’s wrestling with Van Til because Bill’s dialectically sensitive mind, ever open to what might be said against his position, cannot help but entertain the possibility that the sovereign God of Van Til’s theology is the true God. It’s how the God-breathed (theopneustos) Scriptures describe him. But like an open mouth, the open mind, as Chesterton put it so memorably, is ordered toward closing on something.

Bill’s humanistic speculations about “the autonomy of reason” are neither here nor there. His predilection for mediation between extremes notwithstanding, “autonomy” is a fiction. It is arguably a stance that makes God, by His own metaphor, nauseous (Revelation 3:16). Continue reading “Why “bother” to read Van Til? I answer my friend’s question”

On Good Friday I thought it appropriate to “resurrect” this post from three years ago. —A.G.F.

When Jesus was brought before Pilate, “it was the day of the Preparation of the Passover” (John 19:14; emphasis added). Passover lay in the near future. And yet Jesus told his disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this the Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15; emphasis added). What is commonly called “The Last Supper” was the Passover.

If, however, the arguments of Colin J. Humphreys’s The Mystery of the The Last Supper hold up, there is no discrepancy. We may believe Jesus did celebrate the Passover on Nisan 14, not according to the calendar devised during the Babylonian Exile, however, but according to the pre-exilic calendar of ancient Israel. Those calendars were as different from each other as, say, the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar differs from the equally serviceable calendar of the Eastern Orthodox.

The pre-exilic calendar, being 364 days in length, is evenly divisible by 7. In such a calendar, therefore, any given date falls on the same day every year. Therefore, that calendar’s Nisan 14 has always fallen on a Wednesday since the first Passover.  Humphreys’s hypothesis, to which I cannot do justice here, dissolves apparent discrepancies that have challenged faithful readers of the Gospels.

For example, even though Jesus was arrested after eating His Passover, John’s Gospel has servants of the high priest Caiaphas conducting Jesus to Pilate’s hall of judgment before the “official” Passover: “and they themselves went not in the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28b).

Continue reading “Two Passovers? What a difference a calendar makes. [Republished]”