Justin Talor’s post on Lindbeck and Frame is quite helpful. Or it could be.

Taylor seems to see Frame (rightly) as an antidote to what is wrong in the “post-liberal” as well as the “post-conservative” writings of late. But Taylor seems to have been protected from the experience of being told (1994) that John Frame was himself a relativist and that his friend and colleague Vern Poythress is a pluralist.

While I’m thinking about this (and some posts on reading Barth and on Barth and resurrection), I’m guesing he was never told how suspiciously Barthian Frame is or how desirable and helpful it would be to get hold of Frame’s copy of Barth’s Church Dogmatics to find out how his margin notes reveal influence.

But I digress.

I too with more people would read Frame. But the comments I summarize above came not from outside the camp but from those associated with the fortress construction around “reformed theology” to protect it from the nefarioius influence of N. T. Wright and Rich Lusk. Even in recent conferences I still hear one of these men claiming there is an epistemological issue at root that must be settled in order to properly immunize us from these influences. All the king’s horses and men are being rallied to glue those shattered pieces of stereotype back together again. It’s the last hope for the Thornwellian revival that must sweep the land if the true Gospel is to be preserved.

Everytime Justin writes about Frame and Poythress I feel like flying up to Minneapolis and showing up at his door with a couple of six packs New Belguim 1556 and seeing if it will get me across the threshhold. It is hard not to feel kinship on many levels when he posts on these things.