Ligonier a Little Out of Touch at Times?

I subscribe to Tabletalk magazine, the monthly devotional publication of Ligonier Ministries. I am deeply indebted to Dr. R. C. Sproul for his teaching ministry. To say his teaching has greatly impacted my thinking is an understatement. Tabletalk is a fine publication and I applaud the work of Burk Parsons and the staff at Tabletalk.

However, take a moment to digest this sentence from the August 2006 edition of Tabletalk:

What Boethius does in his tractates is to offer a defense of the doctrine of the Trinity where he assumes the truth of the Nicene position, and then deploys logic in order to demonstrate how Trinitarian theology requires careful analysis of how language is used, and how Aristotelian logical categories can help with this task. (from "Boethius: The Philosopher Theologian" by Carl R. Trueman)

Say what?

According to the Ligonier Ministries website, the materials produced by Ligonier are "designed to fill the gap between Sunday School and seminary." Certainly this is a worthy yet daunting goal. But the sentence above is very heavy on the seminary side of the ledger. Here I am a Doctor and I had to re-read it three times before I even began to feel like I was getting a grasp on it. Granted, I'm only a D.Min., not a Ph.D., but nonetheless...well, just look at that sentence again!

Burk Parsons, the editor of Tabletalk also serves as the Minister of Congregational Life at Saint Andrews Chapel, the church where Dr. Sproul serves as the Minister of Preaching and Teaching. I'm no editor, to which anyone who has read this blog much would agree, but, Burk, I have a word of advice: e-mail the rough drafts of these articles to some people from a little less educated congregations demographically prior to sending these articles to print. A Southern Baptist would be perfect! If you can get a Southern Baptist to understand it, you'll make a lot of headway at getting in that middle range between Sunday School and seminary.


On a sidenote, I recently listened to an interview of Carl Trueman, the author of the notorious sentence above, by Mark Dever. He seemed like a pretty cool cat, and spooky smart.