Some quick thoughts on the Minnick interview

I finally got a good chance to actually listen to the 9Marks interview of Dr. Mark Minnick by Dr. Mark Dever. My home computer had some difficulty playing the file and I had not had a chance to download it on to my laptop so that I could listen to the interview properly.

I am working on more specific comments and evaluation, but I will make a couple of quick ones to start off.

First, I think that the conversation between Don Johnson, Greg Linscott and Andy Efting over at an oxgoad, eh is worth the read because I agree with part of what each of these guys have said.

I recognize that being in a situation of being interviewed like this is probably an uncomfortable situation. I know that I would probably feel uncomfortable and as I listened to the interview, I felt that Dr. Minnick was a little uncomfortable as well - especially for the first half-hour or so.

I also agree with Andy that the interview got cut off at the time that it was finally getting interesting.

I thought Minnick's definition of Fundamentalism was pretty good. "A Fundamentalist is a person who believes the essentials of the Christian faith and believes that they are also the essentials for fellowship and cooperation."

I think that Dr. Minnick did a pretty good job with the Galatians 2 passage, but I am not sure how much of it Dr. Dever understood.

I would have liked for the distinctions to be drawn more clearly. Although both men were clear there were differences, it seemed to me that the differences were negligible - even though I know that the are real differences between the positions of the two men.

I thought it was interesting how little Dr. Dever knew about Fundamentalism. He seems to be genuinely interested in learning about Fundamentalism - as though he has very little interaction with it or thoughts about it until recently.

I hope to have a more detailed analysis tomorrow.

One last thing. I wanted to create a transcript of the interview - or at least of relevant parts - so that I could think through it and analyze it more accurately. In order to do so, I used Express Scribe and at times reduced the speed pretty strongly so that I could type without having to rewind as much. The effect of doing that was that at times it sounded like two drunks discussing theology - it struck me as kind of funny.

Just my (initial) thoughts,

Frank