No apologies?

I dreamt last night that I was sitting and reading (I do a lot of that even in my dreams) at my father-in-law's house when a garbage truck backed into the front wall of the house, cracking the drywall around where I was sitting and shattering the window. When I went outside to demand that they repair the house, they pointed at the obviously damaged house and told me that there was no damage. I looked at the broken window and crumbling wall and said, "Well, what about the window and the wall?" The driver said, "No, you said the house was damaged!" Then the alarm went off.

Here's another passage from the Tracy book. I ought to be finishing this one up in the next few days.

Nor does the actual rich diversity of forms in the New Testament grounded in the unifying unity of an even tseeking a response of personal faith signal the call to any kind of thoughtless, lazy theological pluralism. Rather the New Testament diversity is impelled by the dynamism of the event itself and its self-expression into the otherness of a wide range of responses to, witnesses to, that event: responses which posit themselves in and by the event by implying their own fulfillment in the next needed form. Proclamation's positing of the bare that of the event of Jesus Christ implies the who and what of the narratives; the surprises, the resolutions, the end and non-end of the narratives imply the need for symbols and imagesable to capture in manifestation the clues disclosed by the narrative as teh key to their interpretation of the ministry; the irreducible tension of each symbol and the conflict within the whole complex of symbols (cross-resurrection-incarnation) demands the interpretation of critical reflective thought.

So the diversity of the New Testament does not have to be historical accident but can be conceived of systematically as the very stuff of God's self-revelation. Cool, eh?