Rumours have been flying round the blogososphere that Guy Davies and David Sky are the same person. Well, one reader has asked if that is the case, anyway. To try to nip this in the bud, I've decided to do a one-off Blogging in the name of the Lord special interview. The series will return later in the year.
GD: Hello David, tell us a little bit about yourself.
DS: Well, I am a Brit who studied theology at the Evangelical Theological College of Wales, now know as WEST. I decided to get into blogging, because no one else was doing a very good job.
GD: I hear that you suffered from learning difficulties at WEST. Did you need a Teaching Assistant to help you in lessons?
DS: No. I was so clever and well-educated before I went to WEST that they couldn't teach me anything. That is why I had learning difficulties. I probably should have gone to the London Theological Seminary, which caters for really gifted students. As they say, "You can tell an LTS man, but you can't tell him much."
GD: In your blogging manifesto, you claimed that your blog, "Sky's the Limit" will the blogging equivalent of Augustine's Confessions and Calvin's Institutes. Do you suffer from delusions of grandeur?
DS: No, why do you ask?
GD: Hmmm. Right, you carried a post by "Jake Coolicus" on Ten Proposals for World Peace. Is Jake a real person, or did you make him up?
DS: Well, I kind of made him up. You see, I noted that the biggest theology blog is Ben Myres' Faith and Theology . Ben's secret seems to be typing lots of quotes and getting his imaginary friend "Kim Fabricius" to write hymns and "Ten Propositions" about this, that and the other. I thought that I might take a leaf from his book.
GD: Oh, that explains it then. Just to clear things up, you are not really the Exiled Preacher, are you?
DS: No, I'm Sky's the Limit.
GD: Thanks!
Methinks he protests too much...(but I'm still utterly repentant of course!)
ReplyDeleteI've met Kim Fabricius
ReplyDeleteSo let me get this straight. There's Davis Guy, there'sKy David - two entirely different people, one from WEST, one from EAST (or LTS). There's also Kim Fabricius (who Martin Downes has met) and the other guy Coolio. Darby and I are pretty confused. The Bloggy Man hasn't got a clue.
ReplyDeleteAt least Darby Gray has all the right letters (though not necessarily in the right order) and Franz Bibfeldt makes no attempt to be an anagram at all. It is not possible to take anyone from Wales seriously after the ECTW name change (though IMHO that was originally intended as an April fool item for Evangelicals Now and when Jonathan Steven realized that people had taken him seriously he was too embarrassed to confess that it was a joke.)
ReplyDeleteYours,
John Kil-something from Kil-somewhere/.
Gary's comments have just left me totally confused. What are you going on about, man? Did you bring back too much duty free plonk from your cruse?
ReplyDeleteJK,
I don't see why the silly WEST thing means that all Welsh people can't be taken seriously. It was under the English Johnathan Steven that the college was rebranded.
I hear that life is peaceful at WEST.
ReplyDeleteAnd I really have met Kim Fabricius
Martin,
ReplyDeleteIsn't Kim a chaplain at Swansea Uni? Did you meet him in your UCCF work?
And Kim really MUST be (as he insists), a transplanted American. He knows far too much about baseball for an Aussie--even a brilliant one like Ben Myers--to counterfeit.
ReplyDeleteFeel good that ya'll can joke about your seminaries. Mine was taken over by goblins, I mean, fundamentalists, after I left. Highly embarrassing. I wish SBTS WOULD change its name. (In fact, I wish the "new" SBC would quit calling itself Baptist.)
Michael,
ReplyDeletewe are those 'fundamentalists' that have 'taken over' your seminary and would that all the Lord's Baptists were Reformed!
Thanks for all this blue sky thinking guys. All stimulated by the background to Andrew's pic I guess. NB The 'W' in WEST stand for Wales not Welsh. As for plonk -only oil in my cruse. I am a Calvinist, however.
ReplyDeleteJohn, last I looked "Reformed" did not mean "fundamentalist," unless one said, "19th C. Scholastic Calvinist" in place of "Reformed."
ReplyDeleteI have never denied the Puritan-Separatist roots of Baptists, but this attempt to make us into nothing more than 5-point Calvinists with a thing for deep water is simply absurd. Besides which, since I knew Mohler when he was a flaming liberal, you'll never convince me that he believes in anything but power. His "change of heart" was just so he could grab power in the "new" SBC. There are very few people whose sincerity I question, even when I disagree with them. Mohler is one. The man "believes" what is convenient to keep his name on the cover of Christianity Today and him at the helm of a school whose memory he defames daily.
John,
ReplyDeleteMichael W-W has a point. We are not fundys. We're Calvinists.
In the interests of fairness I must point out that Mrs Jonathan Stephen (Sheila) IS welsh!
ReplyDeleteSo he is welsh by marriage.
Guy,
ReplyDeleteWith respect to Albert Mohler, about whom I know very little, I have nothing to say except he seems to associate with an awful number of Reformed guys for a fundamentalist so I assumed that Michael was using 'fundamentalist' to mean men like Tom Nettles and the 'Founders' magazine crew. We are those guys except for the Atlantic Ocean.
Sorry to use this space like this Guy but could M-WW give us chapter and verse for his stance on Am or is this just a hunch? (I'd be glad to discuss this somewhere else if necessary).
ReplyDeleteGary,
ReplyDeleteI'd be happy if MW-W responded to your query here. I've e-mailed Michael and asked him if he would be willing to clarify his remarks.
Okay. I should not have dragged Mohler into this. I should have kept it at the level of saying that I can no longer joke about my alma mater. However, here goes: Although I, personally, am not a 5-point Calvinist and believe that the Founders group distorts Baptist identity in making us ONLY Calvinist (whereas I would want to honor ALL of our roots--Puritan-Separatist, 2 different groups of Dutch Anabaptists--the Waterlanders who influenced John Smyth and the General Baptists and the Collegiants who influenced Blunt and Spilsbury at the origin of the Particular Baptists, later revivalists, Continental Pietists, etc.), I do not question the integrity of Tom Nettles or Timothy George (whom I know), etc.
ReplyDeleteBut Mohler, I regret to say, is a different case. He and I are close in age and he was a doctoral student at SBTS when I was an M.Div. student there and he took over as President of SBTS just as I finished my Ph.D. When I first met Mohler, he was a flaming liberal--not neoorthodox, but well off the deep end liberal. He joked about my interest in Barth that Barth was a "fundamentalist with a genius IQ." Then, in 1985, after figuring out that the fundamentalist party (that was, at first, their self-description) of the SBC was going to win in the internal SBC-feud, Mohler announced to a group of us "now we know which side we must join if we are to have any future." A few weeks later, he "went forward" at an alter call of a well-known mega-church pastor and began denouncing all his professors and saying that he had been misled for years.
Therefore, I question his integrity. I do not think anyone can know what he really believes. He says and writes what it takes to keep him in the position he won by changing his views for political gain. I have also read his dissertation and I question whether it meets the usual criteria as an "original contribution to knowledge." It seems to rehash several other works on the reception of Barth in U.S. evangelical circles. I was the student representative to the Ph.D. committee when Mohler submitted the prospective for his thesis and I pointed out its unoriginality and argued against its acceptance, but I had voice only, not vote. I thought then, and continue to think that Mohler's thesis should not have been accepted. It cheapened all the efforts of those of us who labored hard to do quality, substantive doctoral work.
Anyway, as I said, I shouldn't have dragged this out in public and ruined a fun post. But there it is. My dislike of Mohler is personal and so is my distrust of him. (I will not go into actions he took right after he became SBTS president which I thought/think were unethical for any Christian and which resulted in great harm for many. They are a part of public record on this side of the pond.) My disagreement with the Founders group is not personal and some of them I respect or even like even as we disagree.
In the above comments, MW-W is expressing his personal opinion on Al Mohler. Needless to say, commenters are responsible for their own views.
ReplyDeleteCertainly beats me knowing who it was that locked you out of your favourite bathroom at LTS, Guy. What interesting lives some people lead. Thanks for the personal, Michael.
ReplyDeletebut …
deep sigh!
sounds like I am that fellow too.
Thanks for letting us in here like this Guy and thanks for clarifying Michael.
ReplyDelete