Bring the Books

Brenz on the Gospel

2012-01-27T06:34:00.002-06:00

By nature human beings are made in such a way that they do not want to accept anything from God free of charge but want to earn it by their works and their righteousness. It is diabolical arrogance not to want to get anything from God free of charge but to earn everything, because this is saying that we want to be God ourselves. This is what Adam began in the garden and from there it has spread to the entire human race.

Admittedly there is a danger in teaching justification by faith to people who are rebellious and despisers of religion. But just because there is a danger in doing this, it does not follow that the church should be deprived of what is necessary for its salvation. There is danger in producing wine, because people get drunk on wine. Yet God has created wine, which is healthy if used in the right way... No work of the moral or ceremonial law can justify us in the sight of God because no work can be done by us with the degree of perfection and integrity that would be needed for God to accept it. All our good works are imperfect and corrupt. Therefore they cannot justify us... When it is said that the Gentiles are not justified by the works of the law, this does not mean that good works that are moral or part of the natural law are not to be encouraged. Of course the natural law must be observed, and anyone who does not follow it is ungodly and worse than an infidel. What it means is that the merits of our good works have no validity in the judgment of God, nor do they delivery us from the sentence of condemnation. So we must do the works of the natural law but not think that they can save us from perishing or acquit us before the judgment seat of God. There is another kind of righteousness, namely the righteousness of Christ, which is perfect and which is received by faith.

Johannes Brenz, from The Reformation Commentary on Scripture, Galatians, Pg. 70-71

Facebook Page

2012-01-20T08:29:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to remind our readers to follow us on Facebook. Often we post links to interesting articles and ebooks that do not make it on to Bring the Books. Following us is simple, you can click this link here or click the Facebook icon in the toolbar to the left. Then "Like" our Facebook page. Once you do this, all of the content will show up in your Facebook news feed. Enjoy!

Is Jesus God? Edited by B.B. Warfield for $0.99

2012-01-18T17:57:00.003-06:00

Another project of mine more recently was preparing an eBook of Is Jesus God? which is edited by B.B. Warfield, who also wrote the book's brief introduction. It was actually written by students of Princeton Seminary and published in 1912. The book is succinct and helpful on an important topic. It is now available at the Kindle Store.

The Christian Ministry by Charles Bridges for $0.99

2012-01-18T09:33:00.005-06:00

My first book on the Amazon Kindle Store is now available for purchase. Charles Bridges' classic work on the pastoral ministry, The Christian Ministry has been a help to many ministers, and I have personally been greatly affected by Bridges' exhortations and charges to those who would minister to Christ's church. Containing the insights of a seasoned and tested pastor, this is a book that should have been available for the Kindle a long time ago.

I would request that those of you who have a chance to read the book and look over the edition I prepared write reviews so that curious readers will know that the edition I've created for the Kindle is top-notch quality. At $0.99 it is my hope that every pastor or prospective pastor would read this affordable and important work. I hope you'll also agree I have prepared easily the most attractive cover that Amazon has ever seen.

[PS: If there are any enterprising readers of BTB who can help with a better cover for the book, I'd be happy to thank them with a free copy of the book.]

Piper's Newest Book Free

2012-01-16T08:31:00.001-06:00

John Piper's latest book, Bloodlines, is available for free download from Desiring God. It isn't an eBook, but rather, a PDF.

How Not to Read

2012-01-13T23:50:00.004-06:00

If you are the type to read quickly and to try to digest as much information as you can, then you need to read this quote. In this selection from Charles Bridges we see him reading my mind and seeing right through to my heart.

Ardent minds wish, and seem almost to expect, to gain all at once. There is here, as in religion, "a zeal not according to knowledge."— There is too great haste in decision, and too little time for weighing, for storing, or for wisely working out the treasure Hence arises that most injurious habit of skimming over books, rather than perusing them. The mind has only hovered upon the surface, and gained but a confused remembrance of passing matter, and an acquaintance with first principles far too imperfect for practical utility. The ore of knowledge is purchased in the lump, but never separated, or applied to important objects.

Some again need discretion in the direction of their study. They study, (as Bishop Burnet remarks in the conclusion of his history) books more than themselves. They lose them-selves in the multiplicity of books; and find to their cost, that in reading as well as "making books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Bishop Wilkins ob¬serves,—There is as much art and benefit in the right choice of such books, with which we should be most familiar, as there is in the election of other friends or acquaintances, with whom we may most profitably converse. No man can read every¬thing; nor would our real store be increased by the capacity to do so. The digestive powers would be overloaded for want of time to act, and uncontrolled confusion would reign within. It is far more easy to furnish our library than our understanding.

Charles Bridges, The Christian Ministry

I am one of those who fools himself into thinking that learning by osmosis is actually possible. If I just surround myself with the things I want to learn, they will find a way to seep into my skin and become a part of my soul. Of course, Bridges brilliantly speaks as a man who has been there. I highly commend his book The Christian Ministry to you. I am currently working on an eBook version of the book which should be available in the Amazon Kindle store shortly.

Something Arminians Say, and Calvinists Would Never Say

2012-01-11T07:30:00.006-06:00

James White, in an article for Patheos, points out that Roger Olson's argument against Calvinism is not primarily exegetical, but rather, that he judges God to be a "moral monster" if, in fact, Calvinists are right. White quotes this paragraph by Olson:

One day, at the end of a class session on Calvinism's doctrine of God's sovereignty, a student asked me a question I had put off considering. He asked: "If it was revealed to you in a way you couldn't question or deny that the true God actually is as Calvinism says and rules as Calvinism affirms, would you still worship him?" I knew the only possible answer without a moment's thought, even though I knew it would shock many people. I said no, that I would not because I could not. Such a God would be a moral monster. Of course, I realize Calvinists do not think their view of God's sovereignty makes him a moral monster, but I can only conclude they have not thought it through to its logical conclusion or even taken sufficiently seriously the things they say about God and evil and innocent suffering in the world.

Here is the question - if you are an Arminian (or one of those who refuse to self-identify but who really don't believe in divine election): have you ever heard a Calvinist say in a conversation with you, "If your view of God is right, then I can't worship that God. Your God is evil, sadistic, twisted, horrible, and He isn't worthy of my worship"? Have you ever read anything like this in books by Calvinists?

Let me answer for you - in the whole breadth of conversation and books by Calvinists, I have never heard anything even remotely like this from any Calvinist. It shows, on the part of Olson and those who agree with him, an impiety in one's approach to knowing God. Whereas the Calvinist is unwilling to stand in moral judgment over God deciding whether this or that divine attribute is to their approval, the dissenter (lets call him Arminian for lack of a better term) is often free in offering condemnation of God if He does not measure up.

Some Arminian (pardon the label) reader may see all of this as evidence for the horrible blasphemy Calvinists are at risk of if they are wrong. However, consider that the Calvinist is unwilling to accuse God of wrongdoing. Which position would you rather find yourself in:

1) Holding an honest belief that the Bible teaches election, realizing that, if you are wrong, you taught a wrong view of human/divine freedom. In either case, you have affirmed God's goodness, justice, and holiness.

or 2) Holding an honest belief that the Bible does not teach election, realizing that, if you are wrong, then you taught a wrong view of human/divine freedom. If you are wrong, then you have accused God of wrongdoing - even evil - and have spoken in a way that can only be described as blasphemous and impious.

If the Calvinist is wrong, then he must change his views of divine/human freedom. If the Olsonian Arminian is wrong, then he needs to repent of blasphemy and holding himself as a standard above God.

Did Del Toro Change His Mind, Mid-Series?

2012-01-10T07:23:00.004-06:00

[A little over a year ago I reviewed the first two books in Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan's The Strain trilogy. This review of the third book assumes that you've read my review for the first two books, which you can find here.]

*Spoilers*

About this time last year I offered up that the first two books in the trilogy (The Strain and The Fall) were pretty much Left Behind for pagans. I have changed my assessment, now that the trilogy has concluded. This trilogy is Left Behind for pagans who like a little mysticism sprinkled here and there. (The more cruel among us may just say it's for fans of Left Behind.) Initially, I said that del Toro (who refers to himself as a "lapsed Catholic") had taken a naturalistic approach to vampires and that his approach appeared to be intentional. Some described the series as Stephen King meets Michael Crichton.

When I read the third and final book The Night Eternal this last week, I was dumbfounded. It seemed like the series did a 180 worldview shift. Suddenly, now that the ragtag group of rebels have their hands on the infamous vampire text the occito lumen there is this whole backstory which emerges about how The Master (the big bad vampire who is in the process of taking over the world) is actually the ancient bloodworms of an heretofore unknown archangel named Ozryel who had what can only be described as having had vampiric tendencies before his body was torn to pieces by God as a punishment for biting one of his fellow archangels (or something... it was kind of a sloppy story...). Anyway, the series went from being highly scientific/naturalistic in book one to a very hopeless, nihilistic tone in book two, and then ultimately a very spiritual, religious message and tone in the last book.

God, somehow, becomes a big player in the book, and the unlikely second half of the book involves a lot of repetitive phrases such as "Eph stabbed the vampire,"... "Eph's silver sword impaled the vampire," ... "Eph was almost a gonner, but then Mr. Quinlan saved him." I say "unlikely" second half because while The Master has guns and helicopters and weapons galore, Eph and his fellow rebels really only have the Book, a bunch of swords, and a nuke which they plan to use to blow up The Master's birthplace. This nearly all-powerful being who has subjugated the entire human race by book three simply cannot seem to catch this group of oh-so-clever humans who refused to be turned into vampires.

And in the end, there's a reason for that. God is on their side. With God as the tale's before unknown (and certainly unspoken of) deus ex machina we all know there is no stopping Eph, Fet and Nora and their nuclear dream of a world without the Master. And so the drama is stripped from the story. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that some sort of God won the day in this book, but because he was 100% absent in the first two books, it looks a little like a series that didn't have a built-in ending.

John Owen Ultimate Collection: $2.99

2012-01-06T00:01:00.003-06:00

After months of working time and again to create my own John Owen megabook containing all of Owen's books (and never finishing it), someone else has done it. And it's really great from the content end of things. A gigantic amount of writings have been crammed into a single Kindle file, complete with working tables of contents. At $2.99 my design qualms pale when you consider the value. Nevertheless, my complaints are as follows: (1) Tables of Contents in the front of the book have a light font color so that they are difficult to read. (2) Page breaks were not put at the ends of chapters and books. (3) Footnotes are hard to distinguish from main text. Formatting them in a smaller size would have been helpful.

Ignore my qualms. This is a great bargain. It is clear to me that when it comes to this collection, content went before design, but that's completely fine. After all, these are virtually the complete works of one of the greatest Puritan theologians. The text is accurate and does not appear to have been OCR'd. When you consider that this is a hundred times cheaper than the print editions, you understand what a great collection it is.

A Discourse concerning Evangelical Love, Church Peace, and Unity
A Brief Declaration and Vindication of The Doctrine of the Trinity
A Brief Instruction in the Worship of God
A Discourse Concerning Liturgies, and their Imposition
Theomachia Autexousiastike, Or A Display of Arminianism
A Dissertation on Divine Justice or, the Claims of Vindicatory Justice Vindicated
A Treatise of the Dominion of Sin and Grace
An Inquiry into the Original, Nature, Institution, Power, Order, and Communion of Evangelical Churches (Complete Vol. 1-2)
Christologia or, a Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ: God and Man
Gospel Grounds and Evidences of the Faith of God’s Elect
Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ in His Person, Office, and Grace
Of Communion with God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Each Person Distinctly, in Love, Grace, and Consolation
Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of it; The Danger of Entering into it; And the Means of Preventing that Danger
Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers; The Necessity, Nature, and Means of It
Pneumatologia: Or, A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit
Several Practical Cases of Conscience Resolved
Salus electorum, sanguis Jesu; Or, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ
The Doctrine of the Saints’ Perseverance Explained and Confirmed; Or The certain Permanency of their Acceptation with GOD, and Sanctification from GOD
The Complete Sermons (Vol.1-2)
The Greater Catechism
The Lesser Catechism
Vindiciæ Evangelicæ: Or, the Mystery of the Gospel Vindicated and Socinianism Examined

Purchase from Amazon: $2.99

Books Read in 2011

2011-12-31T16:52:00.003-06:00

Thanks to the Amazon Kindle, I have read more books this year than ever. Here is the list in chronological order. A '*' connotes a much beloved book.

1. Matthew Commentary, by R.T. France
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson
3. The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard Evans
4. The Third Reich in Power, by Richard Evans
5. The Third Reich at War, by Richard Evans
6. Biblical Theology, by Geerhardus Vos
7. From the Finger of God, by Phillip Ross*
8. Living in God's Two Kingdoms, by David Vandrunen*
9. Inside Scientology, by Janet Reitman
10. The Lost History of Christianity, by Philip Jenkins
11. The Great Train Robbery, by Michael Crichton
12. Isaac's Storm, by Erik Larson
13. The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy*
14. Lost in the Cosmos, by Walker Percy*
15. Commentary on Mark, by R.T. France
16. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole*
17. God, No!, by Penn Jillette
18. Love in the Ruins, by Walker Percy
19. The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough
20. Empire of Illusion, by Chris Hedges
21. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
22. Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman*
23. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
24. Bloody Crimes, by James L. Swanson
25. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson*
26. Where the Conflict Really Lies, by Alvin Plantinga*

Book Review: Where The Conflict Really Lies by Alvin Plantinga

2011-12-30T11:48:00.006-06:00

Christian apologetics tends to be extremely defensive in nature. “Defending the faith” is the way we often think of apologetics. Of course we know that apologetics is more than simply defensive, but it is fair to say that a large amount of energy by Christians is spent responding to atheists – be it the so-called four horsemen of atheism (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, or the late Chris Hitchens) or simply the run-of-the-mill atheists whom we've all encountered at one time or another.

Right out of the gate, I want to say this about Alvin Plantinga’s new book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism - he takes the fight to the atheists. After reading this book, it becomes apparent that if they want to carry the mantle of rationality then naturalists/atheists have a lot of work to do.

From the beginning, in typical philosophical fashion, Plantinga is straightforward about the case he is about to spend the book making:

My overall claim in this book: there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism. (90-91) [All references are from the Kindle edition of the book]

He does not insist that science is at peace with every metaphysical commitment, however: “there is a science/religion (or science/ quasi-religion) conflict, all right, but it isn’t between science and theistic religion: it’s between science and naturalism” (103-104).

In Part I of the book, Plantinga recounts the alleged conflict that is said to exist between theism and science. He reviews arguments by Dawkins, Dennett, and Paul Draper, demonstrating that their commitment to naturalism is a metaphysical commitment and that science (and especially evolution) ought not to necessarily entail naturalism as the atheists are wont to insist. He also spends an extended amount of time discussing the question of whether a belief in a God who does miracles and “intervenes” in the world undermines the possibility of scientific exploration or knowledge. Arguing that science deals with the possibility of knowledge within a system when it is closed, it is silent on laws within a system when it is open (such as when a being intervenes from the outside).

Some may find Plantinga’s method of apologetics to be somewhat difficult to swallow. He believes that God’s existence cannot be strictly proven, but his view that God has implanted a sensus divinitatis within mankind means that a belief in God is properly basic and provides an epistemic ground for theistic belief. That is to say, just as we do not perceive other minds to exist, or perceive this house to be standing in front of us through a chain of arguments or inferences, we likewise do not believe that God exists because of a chain of inferences or arguments. Plantinga says that we perceive God rather than arguing to God.

That does not mean that defeaters cannot be presented to the perceiver of God. Theism is not, in principle, nonfalsifiable. Plantinga's argument for proper basicality cannot be used to prove any and every belief. The atheist, it is alleged, offers alleged defeaters for this belief, and the alleged defeaters are to be dealt with.

It is perfectly obvious that theists won’t be able to give an explanation of mind in general—they won’t be able to offer an explanation for the state of affairs consisting in there being at least one mind—because, naturally enough, there isn’t any explanation of the existence of God. But that is certainly not a point against theism. Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God. For any other view of the same level of generality they also come to an end. The materialist or physicalist, for example, doesn’t have an explanation for the existence of elementary particles or, more generally, contingent physical or material beings; that there are some is, from that perspective, a brute fact. It isn’t easy to say precisely what counts as begging the question; but to fault theism for failing to have an ultimate explanation of mind is as good a candidate as any. (545-551)

One of the most important claims Plantinga defends in the book is that evolution does not entail the claim that natural selection is an unguided process. The claim that evolution is unguided is a metaphysical commitment which makes a judgment in an area where science cannot speak with authority.

On the one hand, therefore, we have the scientific theory, and on the other, there is the claim that the course of evolution is not directed or guided or orchestrated by anyone; it displays no teleology; it is blind and unforeseeing; as Dawkins says, it has no aim or goal in its mind’s eye, mainly because it has no mind’s eye. This claim, however, despite its strident proclamation, is no part of the scientific theory as such; it is instead a metaphysical or theological add-on. On the one hand there is the scientific theory; on the other, the metaphysical add-on, according to which the process is unguided. The first is part of current science, and deserves the respect properly accorded to a pillar of science; but the first is entirely compatible with theism. The second supports naturalism, all right, but is not part of science, and does not deserve the respect properly accorded science. And the confusion of the two—confusing the scientific theory with the result of annexing that add-on to it, confusing evolution as such with unguided evolution—deserves not respect, but disdain. (4233-4240)

This claim of Plantinga’s will meet with some resistance from orthodox Christians who have (justifiably) less than friendly feelings towards evolution (especially given the new arguments surrounding Adam & Eve). The point, which is not to be missed, however, is that evolution as such, does not present a defeater for theism. It may present a defeater for a literal reading of Genesis, it may present a defeater for the Westminster Confession’s statements on creation, and it may present a defeater for inerrancy in general, but it does not present a defeater for Christian theism.

The truth of the theory of natural selection, therefore, doesn’t for a moment show that all of life has come to be by way of unguided natural selection, or even that it is biologically possible that it has come to be that way. It is therefore a mistake to say with Dennett that “the theory of natural selection shows how every feature of the world can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction.” (717-720)

The point in Plantinga’s discussion is not whether evolution is true or how old the universe is – the point is that even if one believes in evolution, the metaphysical claim of naturalism, which is often attached to evolution, is an added assumption. The one does not necessarily entail the other.

In Part II of the book, Plantinga reviews the superficial conflict that does exist between theism and modern science. He talks about evolutionary psychology as well as modern naturalistic methodologies in scripture scholarship (higher biblical criticism). Plantinga concedes that evolutionary psychology and higher biblical criticism cannot co-exist happily with a theistic worldview. However, he also argues that these issues are superficial in nature and that they do not offer defeaters for theistic belief since they entail the very metaphysical assumptions that are at issue.

In Part III Plantinga reviews the ways in which theism finds happy concord with science. He discusses the merits of fine-tuning arguments and Behe’s irreducible complexity. Some may be interested Plantinga’s evaluation of fine-tuning arguments from his analytical-philosophical perspective. In sum, he does not find the arguments to be nearly as strong as some classical apologists have:

The right conclusion, I think, is that the [Fine Tuning Argument] offers some slight support for theism. It does offer support, but only mild support. Granted: this is not a very exciting conclusion, not nearly as exciting as the conclusion that the argument is extremely powerful, or the conclusion that it is wholly worthless. It does, however, have the virtue of being correct. (3138-3140)

It is worth the effort to read his arguments for this conclusion, though we don’t have time to work through them in this review. He also has this conclusion regarding Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity:

On balance, then: Behe’s design discourses do not constitute irrefragable arguments for theism, or even for the proposition that the structures he considers have in fact been designed. Taken not as arguments but as design discourses they fare better. They present us with epistemic situations in which the rational response is design belief—design belief for which there aren’t strong defeaters. The proper conclusion to be drawn, I think, is that Behe’s design discourses do support theism, although it isn’t easy to say how much support they offer. (3679-3683)

He also discusses the “deep concord” between theism and science. He discusses the friendliness between the theistic view of human knowledge and the reliability of the senses, mathematics, simplicity, and contingency. Pointing to the Christian view of the image of God in man, his argument centers on the fact that God has made man to be a knower and has designed man’s mind to have a correspondence with the world around him.

According to theism, God has created us in such a way that we reason in inductive fashion; he has created our world in such a way that inductive reasoning is successful. This is one more manifestation of the deep concord between theism and science. (4111-4113)

Atheists cannot make such a claim. Part IV of the book is where Plantinga gets the knives out. Whereas Christians are able to account for induction, simplicity, the constancy of physical laws, the abstract non-physical laws of mathematics, and reliability of the senses, atheists have no such ground for rationality. Regarding physical laws,

[F]rom the point of view of naturalism, the character of these laws is something of an enigma. What is this alleged necessity they display, weaker than logical necessity, but necessity nonetheless? What if anything explains the fact that these laws govern what happens? What reason if any is there for expecting them to continue to govern these phenomena? Theism provides a natural answer to these questions; naturalism stands mute before them. (3939-3942)

Plantinga goes farther than to simply argue that atheists can’t explain the universe. He actually argues that rationality and atheism are mutually destructive. His argument that naturalism is self-defeating has been around in printed form for years. However, in this book it forms the meat and potatoes of his argument against naturalism.

What I will argue is that naturalism is in conflict with evolution, a main pillar of contemporary science. And the conflict in question is not that they can’t both be true (the conflict is not that there is a contradiction between them); it is rather that one can’t sensibly accept them both. (4252-4254)

What Plantinga essentially argues is that unguided natural selection only promotes the survival of the organism in question - not the gaining of truth. This means that while Christians believe we are designed to know truth and that there is a correspondence between the world and our senses, naturalism can make no such claim. Plantinga’s entire argument, formally stated, goes as follows. [KEY: P=Probability R=Rationality N=Naturalism E=Evolution]

(1) P(R/N&E) is low.
(2) Anyone who accepts (believes) N&E and sees that P(R/ N&E) is low has a defeater for R.
(3) Anyone who has a defeater for R has a defeater for any other belief she thinks she has, including N&E itself.
(4) If one who accepts N&E thereby acquires a defeater for N&E, N&E is self-defeating and can’t rationally be accepted. Conclusion: N&E can’t rationally be accepted. This argument shows that if someone accepts N&E and sees that P(R/N&E) is low, then she have a defeater for N&E, a reason to reject it, a reason to doubt or be agnostic with respect to it.

After stating the argument, Plantinga reviews a possible attempt by the naturalist to squirm out from under it:

Naturalistic evolution gives its adherents a reason for doubting that our beliefs are mostly true; chances are they are mostly mistaken. If so, it won’t help to argue that they can’t be mostly mistaken; for the very reason for mistrusting our cognitive faculties generally, will be a reason for mistrusting the faculties that produce belief in the goodness of that argument. This defeater, therefore, can’t be defeated. Hence the devotee of N&E has an undefeated defeater for N&E. N&E, therefore, cannot rationally be accepted—at any rate by someone who is apprised of this argument and sees the connections between N&E and R. (4757-4762)

All in all, Plantinga’s book takes the fight to the atheists. They have serious problems to work through which are endemic to their worldview. How an atheist proposes to solve the problem of rationality with unguided natural selection is beyond me. I am not heavily involved enough in the contemporary debates to really know for myself whether there even has been a proposed solution offered to Plantinga’s past iterations of the argument that naturalism is self-defeating.

Presuppositionalists will have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, they will utterly despise Plantinga's philosophical approach, which involves a great deal of discussion about probabilities (presuppositionalists are allergic to probabilities). They will also not agree with Plantinga's method of arguing for theism in general rather than Christian theism particularly. On the other hand, this book puts a large number of arguments and tools into the hands of the presuppositional apologist.

All in all, Plantinga’s book is an apologetic tour de force. Philosophically rigorous and yet written at a popular level, it constitutes a bold introduction to Alvin Plantinga which many lay Christians have heretofore not had popular access to, and it constitutes one of the strongest challenges to atheism in print. It may not be the book that many want, and most of his readers will not agree with Plantinga on everything (especially his apparent concession to theistic evolution), but one thing is for certain – this is the book which Christendom has needed for years, it is the pinnacle and summation of Plantinga’s philosophical prowess, and distills years of Plantinga's work into a single volume. We are blessed to finally have it.

Interesting Take on the Starlight Issue

2011-12-28T16:07:00.002-06:00

I don't know much about Dr. Hartnett, but this book seems to present some compelling arguments with regard to the starlight issue which we've been discussing here.

Dr. Humphreys found that if you assume the universe has a center, and that God stretched it out (rapid expansion) during creation week, that there would have been a time dilation event near the Earth that would slow down time on Earth to a standstill while time passed in the universe at normal rate. This would result in a few days of time (creation week) passing on Earth while billions of years worth of time pass in the rest of the universe. This explains how the starlight could have gotten to Earth in a few Earth days.

Paradoxically, it also means the Universe is both 6000 years old and billions of years old, depending on the location of the clock.

Check out the review if this is of interest to you.

Summoning Plantinga's Help in Responding to My Own Starlight Argument

2011-12-22T11:26:00.004-06:00

Some time back, I posted an argument against the young earth view of creation. In that post, I stated that if young earth creationism is true, then we can see stars which are millions of light years away which never existed until most of the light years necessary for the light to reach earth would have already transpired. At its most basic level, my argument asserted that the Young Earth model of creationism yielded a God whose world is not epistemologically discernible. If, I argued, God has caused the stars in the sky to have the appearance of having existed at a time when they did not, then foundations for knowledge are undercut. The very first act in the universe appears to have had intertwined with it, a deception.

Others have argued – and this is perhaps the most persuasive argument possible – that God created the light already in transit. In response, it is first important to note that the argument is not that God could not create the light already in transit. That is not in question. What is in question is the implications for general revelation and knowledge in general if God causes things to appear a certain way when they are not (or were not) actually so. This argument tells us that, though the speed of light is basically constant, it was created in transit to earth...My basic argument is that if one wants to deny that the stars which are millions of light years away existed as we see them, then they are not epistemologically justified in believing in the existence of the sun.

Well now, as some of you who follow Bring the Books regularly know, I am a newly minted Young Earther myself. How - it must be asked, do I respond to my own views with regard to the issue of Starlight and its implications for epistemology?

What is most apparent to me, with regard to my starlight argument, is that it proves too much. If, in fact, it destroys knowledge and science (for God to cause something to happen which is contrary to the observable natural order) then we are left with a Bultmanian task of de-mytholization or else a gross unwillingness to follow our principles where they lead.

Until recently, I did not have a very well thought-through philosophy of the relationship between miracles and epistemology. But in Alvin Plantinga's newest book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, he discusses precisely this issue.

Miracles are often thought to be problematic, in that God, if he were to perform a miracle, would be involved in "breaking," going contrary to, abrogating, suspending, a natural law. But given this conception of law, if God were to perform a miracle, it wouldn't at all involve contravening a natural law. That is because, obviously, any occasion on which God performs a miracle is an occasion when the universe is not causally closed; and the law says nothing about what happens when the universe is not causally closed. Indeed, on this conception it isn't even possible that God breaks a law of nature. For to break a law, he would have to act specially in the world; yet any time at which he acted specially in the world would be a time at which the universe is not causally closed; hence no law applies to the circumstances in question and hence no law gets broken.

Loc. 1259-65, Kindle Edition

Here is where Plantinga's thoughts help us regain our footing in dealing with the supposed negative epistemological ramifications for a model of creation which involves God's violating the natural order. The original creation of the universe was not done while nature was a closed system. As a matter of fact, the creation itself was an open event which was already contrary to the natural laws as we commonly think of them. It follows that the starlight which we see, if it was created 10,000 years ago (give or take) originated in an open system and not within a closed system. Science is not able to credibly rule on whether the universe is an open or a closed system since that would be a metaphysical claim which is outside of its purview.

If Plantinga is right, and it is technically not possible for God to break the laws of nature then we must dispense with this whole idea that an act of special creation ought to reflect the fingerprint of something created within an open system (i.e. not everything in the universe should not necessarily be expected to look less than 10,000 years old). It may not be possible for us to tell the difference between God's common work and what we often know as the miraculous. Another way of looking at it is, we ought not to reduce God's work to "within nature" and "against nature." Just because starlight was created rather recently does not mean that it is incumbent upon God to let the light take the billion-odd years that are supposed to have been taken for it to reach earth. Nor does it render science or knowledge impossible. Although we deduce from the speed of light and the distance of the stars that it has taken billions of years for this light to reach us, this is only a valid deduction if we understand all of the circumstances related to the creation of stars and light. The circumstances of the Creation, however, are far more mysterious than we would often like to admit. As has been argued to me by many young-earthers, it is no more contrary to the laws of nature for God to create light "in transit" than for God to create in the first place.

If the old-earth defender wants to dig his heels in here, he must be able to account for the fact that God's existence (given an orthdox understanding of God) means that nature is not a closed system. How does an old-earther argue for an old universe based on the speed of light without painting himself into a Bultmanian view of nature which requires natural consistency from beginning to end, ala the closed system model? I'm not sure. Perhaps someone will offer me an answer in the comments.

D. A. Carson on the New Testament Canon

2011-12-21T09:25:00.002-06:00

One Paragraph Theodicy from Alvin Plantinga

2011-12-18T21:19:00.005-06:00

A smidge of background: in this section, Plantinga is discussing the importance of God's own self-sacrifice in the larger context of discussing animal death.

This overwhelming display of love and mercy is not merely the greatest story ever told; it is the greatest story that could be told. No other great-making property of a world can match this one. If so, however, perhaps all the best possible worlds contain incarnation and atonement, or at any rate atonement. But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain. (Some may snort with disdain at this suggestion; it is none the worse for that.) Not everyone agrees with this theodicy; and perhaps no theodicy we can think of is wholly satisfying. If so, that should not occasion much surprise: our knowledge of God’s options in creating the world is a bit limited. Suppose God does have a good reason for permitting sin and evil, pain and suffering: why think we would be the first to know what it is?

Where the Conflict Really Lies, by Alvin Plantinga
(Kindle Edition, Loc. 978-89)

Hands on With The Reformation Commentary on Scripture

2011-12-12T21:09:00.006-06:00

It is difficult to overplay the importance of the book of Galatians in terms of the Reformation - and especially to Martin Luther. Many of the Reformers regarded Galatians to be of high importance, in part, because they saw Galatians as the message of Romans in miniature. It is fitting, then, that the first volume of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture is Galatians & Ephesians. I'm not exactly prepared to do a full review of this volume, but I spent many hours reading and looking through it over the weekend and thought I would share some reflections on what I see in it that may be of benefit or interest to our readers.

Since the RCS is a new commentary series (Galatians/Ephesians was only released three months ago, and the next volume, Ezekiel/Daniel is set to be released this coming March) it might be fitting for me to mention that this is set to be a 28-volume series which composes verse-by-verse commentary on the text. The body of the commentary is made up of the contents of sermons and commentaries of sixteenth century Reformation thinkers. While the editors speak of wanting to be broad in their spectrum of included thinkers, it is safe to say that the Anabaptist tradition is definitely under-represented in Galatians/Ephesians. I'm okay with that, though others may not be.

Some may be interested in exactly who makes the cut in this book. Certainly Calvin and Luther are the most dependable presences in the book, appearing on nearly every other page (at least). However, there is a very noticeable presence of David Dickson, William Tyndale, Rudolf Gwalther, Martin Bucer, Johannes Brenz, Heinrich Bullinger, Wolfgang Musculus, Kaspar Olevianus, and William Perkins. There are also lesser-known thinkers such as John Prime and Robert Rollock, whom I was very glad to be introduced to by this volume. Many of the writings in this volume have never been translated into English before, and so there is a sense in which much of the content of this book has never been enjoyed by the English-speaking church until now.

Galatians/Ephesians opens with a helpful introduction to Galatians and Ephesians and sets it specifically within the context of the 16th century Reformation. They discuss the impact the book had on Martin Luther as well as other Reformers. I found the introductory essay on Galatians and Ephesians in the context of the Reformation to be of particular value. Each section of Scripture is divided into pericopes with an ESV reading of the text leading off each section, followed by comments on the text in their appropriate place. As you read the comments of the Reformers you begin to see that the editors are moving you forward through the words of the text, and this movement happens very naturally. I personally enjoyed just picking the book up and reading the first twenty pages of commentary straight through. Before you know it, you have moved through the first three verses of Galatians and have heard from fifteen different Reformers, all of whom have minute diversity and general unity in their understanding of the Pauline text.

Each author is introduced by a heading which is meant to quickly summarize the meat of the quote. The quotes from the Reformers range from a single sentence to several pages (I came across a couple of two-page quotes from Musculus in the first 20 pages or so). At the end of the quote is the title of the work which the quote came from.

Luther, of course, is famed for his Galatians commentary, and it only makes sense that he is such a large presence in this volume. In spite of my love of Luther's polemical style, it is my hope that there will be more balance in future volumes between Luther and the other Reformed theologians.

From an aesthetic perspective, the first thing that strikes the reader is the extremely impressive binding. It looks good with, or without the dust jacket. Another thing, with regard to design, is that it sits open well. It is on the larger end of the spectrum with regards to its dimensions. Wide margin, a pleasantly-sized typeface, and sturdy binding all combine to make this one of the more attractive commentaries out there.

The editors of this series have done a great service to the Church by producing these volumes and giving pastors and teachers such unequalled access to the Reformers as they taught through the Bible. And really, what better companions could we choose to go through the Bible with than these great and godly men?

All in all, I am perhaps as excited as is possible for future volumes in this series. I want to recommend, while it is still an option, that our readers consider subscribing to the RCS through Intervarsity Press. I received this first volume as well as Timothy George's book Reading Scripture with the Reformers for $14.98 (that's with shipping included). The next one will just come to me in the mail and I'll pay $30 for each volume. That averages out to around $10 a month (cheaper than Netflix!).

Sproul's The Holiness of God Free on Kindle!

2011-12-04T22:08:00.004-06:00

You know the man. You know the book. As of 10PM on December 4th it's free on Amazon's Kindle Store, though I don't know for how much longer. Act quickly or regret it. [UPDATE: The book is no longer free.]

The Holiness of God, by R.C. Sproul

(Since the price could change at any time, make sure and check that the price says $0.00 before you click to buy the Kindle version.)

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

2011-12-04T07:42:00.001-06:00

As far as biographies go, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs is truly masterful. Isaacson has taken a complex and busy life of a contemporary man and not only made it comprehensible, but also organized the narrative carefully, giving due attention to the most important times in Jobs' life. The fact that most stories have two sides in this book, and those sides get a voice through Isaacson's careful interviews is possibly the best part of it all.

It is difficult to do a review of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs without succumbing to the temptation to review the man, Steve Jobs, himself. When I first read this book, I kept thinking, "what a horrible person!" and asking myself why I would want to read a book about such a deeply flawed individual. Eventually, you stop reading Jobs' story as one which is up for evaluation. After all, it is impossible to read the book without the knowledge that this man, too, is mortal and has feet of clay like the rest of us. If someone were to write a book about my life, there would be more than a few childish tantrums.

In the end, Jobs' life story - like all stories - is about a quest for salvation. Since Jobs was into Eastern philosophy, his quest was twofold: 1) A quest for inner peace and 2) A quest for immortality. I do not consider Jobs' life to be any sort of cautionary tale. His is a life that many aspire to. I believe this is because of the desire for us as fallen men to know that we will live on after we die in the memories and hearts of others. As Jobs put it, he wanted to "make a dent in the universe." This is a fundamental human desire, and I believes it reflects the creative image of God, which we are made in, and our fallen desire to rule in God's place. Again, I don't want to pontificate and use Jobs' life as an opportunity to sermonize.

My point is that Jobs was just like the rest of us. We all want to be remembered. We all want to live on. We all want to be important to others. We all tend to live in terror of a universe where we do not matter. This fear in Jobs is most apparent as Isaacson discusses Jobs' return to Apple from cancer treatments around 2008. He was upset that Tim Cook had announced that Apple would go on with or without Jobs at the helm.

Jobs' zen-mentality meant that in his personal life he eschewed cluttered living and elaborate possessions. He lived in an unfurnished mansion for years, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. When he did get married and discovered that women don't want to live in unfurnished houses, he relented and picked a very understated home in the suburbs to live in. At one point, his children referred to one of the Apple employees who owned a boat as their "rich friends" even though Jobs was doubtlessly worth billions more than this employee.

While a desire for simplicity and escape from material posessions was an important drive in Jobs' aesthetics and lifestyle, his own sister pointed out to him the glaring contradiction of believing the world is a better place if people have less "stuff" while at the same time creating things which people covet and desire and gather around themselves. Jobs' response was that the things he creates make the world a better place. It would be a mistake if we see this contradiction in Jobs, however, and don't see it - to a greater or lesser degree - in ourselves.

Having been born in the early 80s, I grew up with the first Macintosh in my house. At a very young age I was playing with Mouse Paint and loving it. I grew up during the home computing revolution and got to see firsthand the excitement in the air as the promise of a connected world came to fruition. Reading this book took me back to those days when the tech industry seemed to me an exciting, emerging, and far away place. At one point when I was a kid I bought a book on C++ and tried to teach myself programming. I did create a DOS-based calculator program, but I gave up on programming because I was terrible at Algebra. However, I never stopped admiring the workmanship and skill that went into creating technology.

This book convinced me that the world is a better place because Steve Jobs was in it and made the things that he made. I came to appreciate the simplicity of the Apple aesthetic.

[In a nutshell, I believe that the strength of Apple is in the fact that, other than hackers and hardware nuts, people buy computers to do things, to accomplish things. The PC is in the disadvantage because it is higher maintenance (take it from someone who owns a PC and a Macbook). Rather than doing, the PC experience is about making the hardware and software work. With Apple, it is all about using the technology instead of focusing on the technology. The more simplistic the experience, the more people can get to the work at hand. This is why a writer (such as myself) who is not a hacker or tech geek (anymore) wants to just grab his Macbook and start writing. The computer becomes a conduit for interactivity rather than a tinkering project or an object of fixation.]

In the end, Steve Jobs' life story is worth reading, though I offer a few caviats. First, this book is for those who are Apple fans. Apple people will love this book. Second, this book is for businessmen and entrepeneurs who are fascinated by others' success (and failure) stories. Third, this book is for those who are interested in the home computing revolution and who are interested in getting a behind the scenes look at how the industry came to look the way it did (though from a decidedly Apple-centric angle). Fourth, there is a lot of offensive language in this book. This is a book for thick-skinned readers. If you can't handle it, don't pick it up. Even John Lassetter has a choice F-bomb in the book. Finally, this is most certainly a book for people who enjoy great biographies.

Walter Isaacson has skillfully taken this multifaceted life and woven it into a comprehensible (though often non-linear) narrative. I found myself in constant appreciation of Isaacson's decision-making in terms of when to move forward in the narrative and when to jog back in the timeline to an earlier subject when had not yet been adequately dealt with. My guess is that this was not an easy book to write.

Becoming a Young-Earther After 12 Years

2011-12-02T23:35:00.002-06:00

12 years. I've been an old-earth creationist for twelve years. More precisely, I've held what is often called a Day-Age View of creation. While refusing to believe in evolution, I have often scoffed at the idea of being a young earth creationist. And so, I have stood by Hugh Ross and his interpretation of Genesis since as long as I can remember.

This began ages ago. I was once an atheist. While I was in high school, I defaulted to atheism because I did not like my parents' religion, and frankly, I didn't like the idea of God and was embarrassed by the tongues-speaking, word-of-knowledge loving, 700 Club watching Christianity of my father. When I was 17, however, I had a change of heart. It was the Spirit of God changing me and making me into a new person, though I just thought it was my own great idea at the time. One of the tools God used was Hugh Ross' books The Fingerprint of God and The Creator and the Cosmos. These books not only affected the way I looked at the universe, but they opened me up to the truth that I was created by someone and that I could not live my life as a rebel against Him and expect to escape unscathed. I will never forget Hugh Ross, and I hope someday to meet him and thank him for his ministry at Reasons to Believe. I know that many young-earthers demonize his ministry, but he was used of God to change my life.

In becoming a Christian, I was never asked to put away my old presuppositions about the universe (especially the age of it). In fact, the beauty of Ross' approach to apologetics was that it met me where I was at and showed me that, in my view of the universe, I still had to acknowledge a creator. It disarmed me without my permission, yet never asked me to lay down my arms. For me, it was never a question of science vs. revelation. I always saw them as complementary.

Early on in my life, and even after coming to faith, I was exposed to the ministry of Kent Hovind. I remember bits and pieces, but what I do remember was embarassing. I saw a wild-eyed guy who, in my mind, took some facts that he learned from reading Stephen Hawking, put a Christian twist on them, and then spent most of his time arguing that old-earthers like me were wrong. He followed up his presentation by claiming that the Loch Ness Monster (Nessie) was real, that there may still be dinosaurs alive today, and even showing slides of people and dinosaurs living side-by-side. I also remember a suggestion on his part that at one point men may have domesticated dinosaurs (complete with a slide of a man riding on a saddled triceratops).

Ludicrous. Just ludicrous. I was an intelligent, thoughtful, scientific person, and I knew a crackpot when I saw one. In truth, I remember little of Hovind's ministry. I only remember the crazy parts that I recalled here. The point of this is not that I want to defame a godly man like Kent Hovind. The point here is to explain that my old-earth views which I have held for a dozen years were a combination of unabandoned presuppositions and reaction against a brand of fundamentalism which I found ugly and embarrassing.

My exposure to young-earth ministries since meeting Hovind's has not faired much better. Earlier this year our church hosted a speaking engagement with Jonathan Sarfati which I found to be far less than compelling. Like most creationist ministries, Sarfati's ministry seemed to be more focused on showing old-earth Christians that they were wrong than with meeting evolutionists in battle. This is still my perception of most creationist-focused ministries.

In the last couple of years I decided to revisit my assumptions about the book of Genesis, and one thing which I came to believe was that the Day-Age view of Genesis which I held did not stand up to the reading I was giving to it. For one thing, my interpretation of Genesis required the creation of stars (including the sun) on day one, while on day four I merely understood God's "making" the sun to be a revealing of the sun through some sort of primordeal mist. To my mind, this did not do the text justice because pulling back a mist is not the same thing as "making" the sun.

I did not hold to any sort of de-chronologized reading of Genesis, and so generally the order of the events in the text began to bother me, from my old-earth perspective. Perhaps my project to make science and scripture comport could not stand up to the scrutiny. Within the last year I turned towards the Framework view of Genesis and for a time was pleasantly surprised that many of my problems seemed to disappear with the Framework view. After all, the Framework view is not about science. It does not claim to know how old the earth is because the Framework view of Scripture does not understand the Bible as even speaking to the age of the universe. I found the chiastic structure between day 2 and day 5 to be quite compelling. I found the dual triadic structure of days 1-3 (creation kingdoms) and days 4-6 (creation kings) to be very insightful. I found Meredith Kline's argument that Genesis 2:5-6 establishes that creation happened through normal providence to be devastatingly helpful. In the end, I was ready to hold and defend the Framework view. The only thing is, I realized that I could appreciate the chiastic structure of the days of creation without actually de-chronologizing Genesis. I also knew that there were ways of reading Gen. 2:5-6 from a young-earth perspective that seemed perfectly acceptable, exegetically speaking. To make it simple, I realized that I wasn't being dragged kicking and screaming by the text towards the Day-Age view or the Framework view. It was the Young-Earth view which I was being dragged kicking and screaming towards.

In a conversation with my pastor, he asked me a pointed question. Though I don't remember the exact wording, he asked me essentially whether there was something prideful or stubborn that was keeping me from accepting the plain reading of the text. Although I have never found the argument that the plain meaning of the text is the right meaning compelling (it isn't) his question cut through a lot of the issues and got to the state of my heart, which is what I needed. The truth is, I was resisting a young-earth reading of Genesis because I was too proud to be a part of the Kent Hovind crowd. I was so judgmental and proud all these years against Kent Hovind's weirdness that I kept myself from what I now believe is the most sensible and accurate reading of the words of Genesis.

I have come to believe, after all of these years, that God did, in fact, create in six literal 24-hour days. I resisted holding this view for negative, rather than positive reasons. I was sinning these many years by judging my fellow Christians who I deemed to be less sophisticated than me because they held to a literal, 24-hour view of creation, and I suppose this blog is as good a place as any for me to repent of my sinful attitude.

Let me add a postscript here and just say that I do not believe that day-agers or frameworkers hold to the views they do because of the reasons I did. I am not interested in imputing any motives to those with whom I used to agree on this issue. The truth is, we are all complex creatures, and if it took 12 years for God to root this single strand of pride out of my heart, I would not presume that the issue is the same with others.

And the winner is...

2011-12-01T08:12:00.003-06:00

We have a winner in our G.K. Beale book giveaway! The grand prize winner, who will be receiving G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology is Kurt Scharping. The runner up, who will be receiving Guy Waters' Federal Vision and Covenant Theology is Robert Hickok. Thanks for liking our Facebook page. Continue to support us in the future and we may be able to do more giveaways like this one!

Giveaway: Last Day!

2011-11-30T08:34:00.001-06:00

Just wanted to send out a reminder that today is the last day to be part of our giveaway. All you have to do to enter this giveaway is to "Like" Bring the Books on our all-new Facebook page. Tomorrow, or soon thereafter, we will randomly draw two names from our followers on Facebook.

Grand Prize

The grand prize winner will receive A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New by G.K. Beale. This highly anticipated volume is out now and we had a copy ready to give away.

Runner-Up

The runner-up will receive The Federal Vision and Covenant Theology: A Comparative Analysis by Dr. Guy Waters.

We will contact the winner via Facebook to get shipping information. Due to the costs of shipping, the giveaway is only for those living in the continental United States.

Challenging The Communing/Non-Communing Distinction?

2011-11-24T21:57:00.004-06:00

This is an open question to paedocommunionists. The question was actually raised by Guy Waters and Ligon Duncan as I was reading through their book Children and the Lord's Supper (on page 27). In the introductory chapter, they discuss troubling questions which paedocommunion raises. In particular, they bring up the paedocommunionist argument that if one is a baptized member of the church (regardless of age) then one should not be restricted from participating in the life of the church, including - of course - communion.

Paedocommunionists urge that the privilege of partaking of the Lord's Supper belongs to all church members as church members. This raises the question whether there are any privileges that a paedocommunionist believes the Scripture to forbid a child member from exercising. In other words, paedocommunion calls into question the integrity of the communing/non-communing member distinction, and may even call into question the distinction itself. A whole host of pastoral questions surface. Is a six or seven year old member of the church entitled to vote in congregational elections? To stand for church office, if the congregation so desires? What about church discipline? In the Presbyterian Church in America, there are special procedures for discipline of non-communing members. Would a paedocommunionist understand young members of the church to be subject to the same formal judicial process to which communing members are subject?

Nine Reasons Beale's NT Biblical Theology Is Unique

2011-11-18T06:50:00.005-06:00

In his book A New Testament Biblical Theology, G.K. Beale offers nine ways in which his NT biblical theology differs from other NT biblical theologies:

1) "The approach of this book overlaps with that of a whole-Bible biblical theology in that it addresses more directly the theological storyline of the OT" (5).

2) "The main facets of the OT narrative story are then traced into and throughout the NT" (6).

3) "The bulk of discussion in this biblical theology of the NT consists of attempts to elaborate on the main plotline categories of thought through surveying the places in the NT where that thought is expressed." This is in contrast to the chronological/canonical approach offered by most NT biblical theologies.

4) "[This Biblical Theology] is concerned with how important components of the OT storyline are understood and developed in Judaism. This is significant because it is important to see how the major biblical-theological notions of the NT develop these same OT components and whether they do so in dependence on Judaism or in line with Judaism or in contrast to it" (8).

5) "This approach to NT biblical theology will focus more on the unity of the NT than on its diversity" (9).

6) "It is not usual to find a concise definition of what is a classic NT theology. On the other hand, my working definition of NT biblical theology is the following, in dependence on Geerhardus Vos' definition of a whole-Bible biblical theology: 'Biblical theology, rightly defined, is nothing else than the exhibition of the organic progress of the supernatural revelation in its historic continuity and multiformity.'... This project places the interpretation of NT texts in relation to the preceding epochs found in the OT, which often occurs through analyzing the use of particular OT passages in the NT" (9).

7) "The approach of this book is most in line with Stuhlmacher's and Dodd's theory of NT biblical theology...Nevertheless, this book sets out in a different direction in the way it executes how the two Testaments are related" (11-12).

8) "[Other biblical theologies] conduct their discussions generally corpus by corpus...Also, in contrast, as noted earlier, my approach is organized by the major components of my formulation of the NT storyline" (14).

9) "In light of what I have discussed thus far, I categorize my biblical-theological approach to be canonical, genetic-progressive (or oganically developmental, as a flower develops from a seed and bud), exegetical and intertextual. This approach could be summarized as a 'biblical-theological-oriented exegesis.'" (15)

If you want Beale's book, you can enter our drawing to win a free copy (the drawing will be on December 1st). If you don't have the patience, then you can order your copy from the Westminster Bookstore for 45% off, though that offer is about to expire.

Responding to James Jordan's 'Review' of Children and the Lord's Supper

2011-11-15T20:40:00.006-06:00

Over at Amazon, I noticed that James Jordan has already posted a review of Children and the Lord's Supper edited by Guy Waters and Ligon Duncan. I only received my copy in the mail today, but I began reading it with much excitement. After only reading ten pages in the book, I felt compelled to respond to James Jordan's review. Here is his original 1-star review:

As a longtime advocate of paedocommunion, I can safely say that I have never heard of anyone who believes that children should be admitted to the Lord's Table on the basis of birth from one Christian parent. Admission to the Table is by baptism, and children should begin to eat in Church when they are old enough to eat at home. Growing up at Jesus' table is perfectly natural in the New Creation. Perhaps the authors in this symposium should have bothered to read what paedocommunionists actually believe before putting out their criticisms!

What follows is my response to Jordan's review:

Mr. Jordan: On page 11 of the book, they do in fact, define paedocommunion as they are using the term as "the admittance of a covenant child to the Lord's Supper on the basis of his descent from at least one professing Christian parent." This is the sentence you find fault with. However, the very next sentence of the book is helpful: "Paedocommunion, then, maintains that a child's membership in the visible church is sufficient to admit him to the Table." You agree with this statement. Your complaint is not with the form of paedocommunion, but with the method by which one is a member of the visible church. The Westminster Standards say that children are baptized by virtue of their already being within the covenant prior to their baptism (WLC Q.166). And so Waters and Duncan are assuming a traditional Reformed view of membership in the visible church in keeping with their own church's (PCA) confession.

Hence, the book appears to be aimed at those who hold a confessional view of admittance into the visible church. If you believe that it is baptism itself which makes one a member of the visible church then on such a basis I could see why you would disagree with the authors' definition of paedocommunion. It is my hope that you actually read this book completely before posting this review.

Another way of putting it is that Jordan's complaint is that the book is not geared towards a Federal Vision understanding of admission into the visible church.

Best Christological Hymn Of All Time

2011-11-15T07:06:00.003-06:00

In his Pillar New Testament Commentary on the Gospel of John, D.A. Carson includes the following hymn at the close of his discussion of John's prologue (1:1-18). I've never heard this hymn before and so am grateful that he chose to include it.

Thou art the everlasting Word,
The Father's only Son;
God manifestly seen and heard,
And Heaven's beloved one.
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou
That every knee to Thee should bow.

In Thee most perfectly expressed
The Father's glories shine;
Of the full Deity possessed,
Eternally divine:
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou
That every knee to Thee should bow.

True image of the Infinite,
Whose essence is concealed;
Brightness of uncreated light;
The heart of God revealed
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou
That every knee to Thee should bow.

But the high mysteries of Thy name
An angel's grasp transcend;
The Father's only - glorious claim! -
The Son can comprehend
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou
That every knee to Thee should bow.

Throughout the universe of bliss,
The center Thou, and sun;
The eternal theme of praise is this,
The Heaven's beloved One:
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou
That every knee to Thee should bow.

Josiah Condor (1789-1855)

The Church as the Marriage Battleground

2011-11-14T21:46:00.008-06:00

I am constantly dancing on the periphery of pop cultural knowledge. On the one hand, I can tell you every video game that is coming out in the next month and how the reviews for them are stacking up. On the other, I have no idea who the Kardashians are, or why they are famous (I am told nobody knows). Actually, I was just told - by someone who was quite shocked at the news - that one of the Kardashians is getting a divorce after only having been married for 72 days.

It took me a minute to process this, because our culture is not shocked at all by divorce. It is ubiquitous. It is all around us. It is like pornography - it infects everyone's home (or so it is assumed), and so everyone is afraid (including many pastors) to tell the truth about it. So what is so special about this Kardashian divorce? Nothing. It is an opportunity for a jaded society to pretend it still has some qualms when in reality it just wants an opportunity to judge a beauty queen who did what they always expected, only much quicker than they expected it.

Nobody whom I have spoken to or heard on the radio is shocked that she got divorced, but they are shocked at how quickly she got divorced. While society pretends to reel at this not-so-shocking news, they secretly must acknowledge her for her efficiency at ending the marriage before it had a chance to fall apart and end in misery. Marriages today are not expected to endure. They are assumed to eventually fall apart. At your average wedding, the jaded crowd listening to the vows is not in awe that two people are uniting for life, till death. If they are honest, they will admit that they wonder what will be the now-happy couple's undoing: an affair? an emotional breakdown? failure to launch on the man's part? The crowd searches its mind for a breakdown which seems most compatible with the couple in front of them.

For years, we have been told that gay 'marriage' and gay unions will undermine marriage (and I have no doubt that in some sense they do, though I'm not trying to be political here). Has anyone considered that most straight marriages today are doing more to undermine marriage than a whole San Francisco courthouse could ever seek to do? Kim Kardashian's pathetically surface-level miming of vows is the real future of marriage.

I said earlier that I wasn't trying to be political, but in a sense I am. If this is what marriage is in the North American context, then why would the Church care two winks whether its view of marriage is what the magistrate acknowledges? Real, true, lasting marriages rooted in Christ and His intercession will never be performed by a judge, a Unitarian minister, or a ship's captain anyway. God knows if a marriage is real. God has revealed to his bride what His view is in these matters, and let us just say a 72 day marriage or a marriage that ends in divorce after even 50 years is not His will. The Church is the guardian of these truths - not Clinton or Bush or Obama or a Supreme Court or a House of Representatives. The battle lines should be drawn in our churches. The Church is the only institution with the right to chastise their members for so blatantly flouting and mocking marriage as Ms. Kardashian has done. The Church is the last battleground of marriage, not the Congress.

Beale Giveaway Reminder

2011-11-13T14:34:00.003-06:00

A friendly reminder from Dr. Beale to enter to win a free copy of his new book, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New.

Watch the video below to see Dr. Beale discussing the book.

We will also be giving away a copy of Guy Waters' book The Federal Vision and Covenant Theology to a second person. If you want to enter to win, just "like" Bring the Books on Facebook. The last day to enter is November 30th. We'll announce the winner on December 1st. Currently, the probability you will win at least one of the drawings is 1 in 43. That is much better than the lottery!

The SBC is Not a Business

2011-11-08T11:44:00.001-06:00

I came across this editorial this morning that discusses the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention is considering changing their name. As I read it, I was struck by the fact that the author constantly compared the SBC to a business. For example,

As for geographic bias, I don’t think anyone will cancel their insurance because they perceive that New York Life is full of know-it-alls who talk too loud or will refuse to fly Southwest Airlines, worried that the company may be operated by bowlegged people with cow poop on their boots. It’s not the name; it is the public’s perception of the service they deliver.

In the midst of discussing the name change, the author takes a detour and comments on the fact that Al Mohler, president of one of the SBC seminaries, does not believe that women are fit for ordained ministry, the author says,

You see, women can run for president of the United States, be a senator or a governor, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or an astronaut, but they can’t be preachers in the SBC churches.

Even in this quote, the author seems to want to handle the Church like a business or other such enterprise. Regardless of your views on the "women-in-ministry" issue, the Church is not a business and these issues (a churches name and who is fit for church office) are not decided on the basis of popular opinion or other methods of the business world. The SBC is not a business. It is not run by a CEO or by any other person except Jesus Christ. Christ is the head of the Church and runs his Church through his word.

"Behind a Frowning Providence..."

2011-11-07T21:21:00.005-06:00

I began this day with an unwelcome cold shower. This unpleasant cold shower was a kindness of the providence of God. Let me explain. I got into my shower this morning only to realize that there was no hot water. After expediently showering, I went downstairs to light the pilot on our water heater, only to find it would not light. I also noticed that our furnace was clicking and not lighting. It also was apparent that our dryer (gas) was running, but it wasn't warming up. Anyone with a lick of sense will tell you that something was wrong with our house's gas supply, and they would have been right.

Our local gas company came out later in the day and explained that they installed a new meter for us because the old one was not allowing gas to get through. With the new meter installed, the men from the gas company were gracious enough to re-light our pilots for my wife, as I was at work for a few more hours. When the man from the gas company lit the pilot, he also checked for Carbon Monoxide leaks. Low and behold, he found one. Evidently, our house is built in a way that excess CO is vented through an old incinerator flew. However, the CO was not escaping - it was staying in our house. Evidently, birds had made their home in our chimney and had so blocked the opening that no light was even able to get through. The gas company would not turn our gas back on until the obstruction was removed.

Our landlord promptly had the flew cleaned out, our gas was turned back on, and the pilots were lit. Tonight, we have heating and hot water, praise God. What really concerns us is that our house may have been filling with carbon monoxide for quite some time. The gas company told us that we might have all died in our sleep some night because of this leak. If it hadn't been for my cold shower this morning and the discovery of this obstruction which lay at the end of a long chain of complex events, we still could be in serious danger of carbon monoxide poisoning.

What I mean to say is, I thank God for this event which began the day. I was not thanking God for my cold shower at the time, but I have spent the entire evening thanking Him for what I thought was a "frowning providence" on His part. Our lives were literally saved because this gas meter went bad.

It has been a hard week, I won't lie. We had two funerals in one week. We spent an entire week separated as a family because of one of the funerals. Work has been exhausting. Responsibilities keep piling on. I woke up this morning with a freezing cold shower.

In all of this, I am reminded of brother Cowper's words:

Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

Much of the time, we don't have the pleasure of seeing God's smiling face in the immediacy of our pain or apparent "frowning providences." It is in the times when we can't see God's smiling face when we glorify Him by trusting Him anyway that He is good, and that He does good, and that He will not allow His saints to endure anything which is not for their eternal good. We do Him no honor by claiming that the things which happen to us are not His will and that they are not sent by Him. In so doing, we lose God's entire purpose in our pain. In fact, by denigrating God's sovereignty in our pain, we make it impossible for God to have a purpose in our darkest hours. These two claims together are our anchor: (1) God rules even my pain, and (2) He is absolutely good and always does what it right. Remove one and He is a despot. Remove the other, and he is a well-intentioned weakling.

Bring the Books Book Giveaway

2011-11-04T20:23:00.006-05:00

Between now and November 30th, we will be hosting a book giveaway. All you have to do to enter this giveaway is to "Like" Bring the Books on our all-new Facebook page. Once the deadline rolls around, we will randomly draw two names from our followers on Facebook.

Grand Prize

The grand prize winner will receive A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New by G.K. Beale. This highly anticipated forthcoming volume will not be released until December.

Runner-Up

The runner-up will receive The Federal Vision and Covenant Theology: A Comparative Analysis by Dr. Guy Waters.

We will contact the winner via Facebook to get shipping information. Due to the costs of shipping, the giveaway is only for those living in the continental United States.

Who Wrote the Gospels?

2011-11-01T08:40:00.001-05:00

Dumb Evangelicalism, Neil Postman, and Church Splits

2011-10-26T09:29:00.006-05:00

In his ubiquitous and often beloved book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman spends the first half of the book charting the rise and fall of the "typographical culture" which perished with the rise of new media (radio, television, etc.). In the first part of the book, Postman claims that 18th and 19th century "American public discourse, being rooted in the bias of the printed word, was serious, inclined toward rational argument and presentation, and, therefore, made up of meaningful content" (p 52). According to Postman, this was because the printed word created the context of discourse. The printed word created the environment in which people thought, conversed, and preached.

As part of Postman's effort to buttress this contention, he points to the contrast between someone like Jonathan Edwards and TV preachers like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham. Whereas Edwards delivered lengthy treatises and dissertations from the pulpit (and the people understood him!), Falwell and Graham comparatively speak/spoke in soundbites with simplistic language. Largely, Postman observes, religious, legal, and political intercourse became dominated more and more by image and personality and less by direct theological concerns.

These sorts of observations are helpful, I think, in observing evangelicalism as a whole, today. I wish to offer an anecdote. The town in which I live has a population of approximately 13,000 people. In our town there are approximately (and this is very approximate) 50 churches (none of which are Reformed, by the way - are you reading, PCA/OPC church planters?). In the last ten years, there have been at least three new churches that I can think of. All of them arose from church splits. What I want to observe is not the existence of church splits - those happen all of the time here in the midwest - but rather, the reason for those church splits. Was it doctrine? Was it theology? Was it predestination and the virulent influence of incipient, ugly, unhappy Calvinism? No. It was personalities. These are churches which split off of one another and started new fellowships (all non-denominational churches) because they felt that a leader at another church was not given their due or because this or that group felt that they connected with a certain small group leader. Churches in my community appear to be more governed by personality than by truth/doctrine. My fear is that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

This may be a merely anecdotal proof, but it is a symptom of a sickness in evangelicalism today. I am at least encouraged by doctrinally-based church splits, because it reflects a culture where God Himself is more important to worshippers than the shepherd. However, to be frank, the state of evangelicalism in my town almost causes me to deeply despair over our ever living in a day when truth and reason are again celebrated over celebrity and personality. Some time back, Doug Wilson opined that Postman and McLuhan are wrong, and that technology will not destroy the church, but rather, enrich her as a type of wealth. I cannot help but think that if I were a post-millennial I might find room agree with his friendly assessment of the situation. As it stands, however, I see nothing ahead but a further dumbing-down and a further decline in terms of the content of the things which once mattered.

New 'Five Views' Book

2011-10-19T20:26:00.004-05:00

There is a new 'Five Views' book which came out less than a month ago. I only just found out about it, but I must say it seems like the most important of all of the 'views' books that have ever been released. I'll list the contributors, and you can try and guess the specific subject this new book is tackling.

Traditional Reformed (Michael S. Horton)
Progressive Reformed (Michael F. Bird)
New Perspective (James D. G. Dunn)
Deification, or Theosis (Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen)
Roman Catholic (Gerald O’Collins and Oliver Rafferty)

Bavinck on Benefits of Baptism and Incorporation Into the Church

2011-10-18T18:59:00.003-05:00

The baptized person is saved from a corrupt generation, set apart from the world (Acts 2:40-41), made into a disciple of Jesus (Matt. 28:19; John 4:1), incorporated into his church (1 Cor. 12:13), and hence obligated to live a blameless life (Gen. 17:1) in newness of life (Rom. 6), to confess God's name and to keep his commandments (Matt. 28:19). All these benefits have already been bestowed on the baptized person before baptism in the word of the gospel. They were received on the part of the baptized by faith; but now these benefits are further signified and sealed to them in baptism. Hence the situation must not be pictured as one in which before baptism only a few and in any case not all of these benefits were granted in faith and that the one(s) still lacking are now bestowed in baptism. For the Word contains all the promises, and faith accepts them all. There is not a single grace that is not conveyed by the Word and only by the sacrament. Incorporation into the body of Christ also occurs through faith and receives its sign and seal in baptism.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics 4.521 (My italics)

Concerning Signs and Un-Sign-Like Language

2011-10-16T19:28:00.004-05:00

TE Stellman: To that end, how would you respond to the language of the indictment’s first charge that baptism confers or conveys saving benefits?

Dr. John Collins: Right. Well then - - then it becomes incumbent upon us to ask, well what do we mean by saving and saving benefits. After all it is a Bible writer who said in Peter 3:21 baptism now saves you. And so it’s our job to understand what, what Peter means by saying that.

Leithart Trial Transcript, pg. 308

Throughout the Leithart trial, the defense insisted, repeatedly that their ascription of effectual power to baptism stems from a straightforward reading of texts like 1 Peter 3:21 and Titus 3:5. As sort of a counterpoint to this notion, I wanted to share an extended quote from John Fesko's wonderful book on baptism, Word, Water, and Spirit: A Reformed Perspective on Baptism. Although Fesko does not deal with Federal Vision or with TE Leithart's sacramental views, he does deal with texts which seem to attribute saving power to signs, and therefore I find what he has to say very helpful.

Sometimes biblical language appears to equate the sign and the thing signified. For example, Christ gave the cup of the supper to His disciples and said, "This is My blood" (Matt. 26:28). Similarly, some interpreters see the identification of the sign and thing signified in Paul's statement to Titus: "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit" (3:5). And the apostle Peter says, "There is also an antitype which now saves us - baptism" (1 Peter 3:21a).

In one sense, this language is not new; there is a similar pattern in the Old Testament, where sacrificial rites were said to bring forgiveness of sins. For example, on the Day of Atonement, the animal sacrifices were an atonement for sin (Lev. 16:34). But in the New Testament, there is the seemingly contradictory statement: "For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins." (Heb. 10:4). This is not doublespeak, but is what exegetes have defined as a metonymy. A metonymy is "the use of one word (often an attribute) for another that it suggests, as the effect for the cause, the cause for the effect, the sign for the thing signified." An example of a metonymy is Psalm 23:5a: "You prepare a table before me." Here the word table is a metonym for food. In this respect, biblical signs have never been an end unto themselves, but have always pointed beyond themselves to the thing signified. Thus, the Old Testament sacraments, such as the sacrifices, had no saving efficacy but pointed to the person and work of Christ, the true sacrifice that brings the forgiveness of sins through faith by the working of the Holy Spirit. The sacraments of the New Testament function in the same manner. As argued in Part II, the water of baptism points to Christ's baptism of the church with the Spirit. Therefore, Christ through the Spirit saves, not the water. This conclusion is evident in the latter half of 1 Peter 3:21: "There is also an antitype which now saves us - baptism (not the removal of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God), through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." The "answer of a good conscience toward God" is a God-given faith in the resurrected Christ. Calvin explains: "Neither ought our confidence to inhere in the sacraments, nor the glory of God be transferred to them. Rather, laying aside all things, both our faith and our confession ought to rise up to him who is the author of the sacraments and of all things" (Institutes 4.14.12).

At the end of this same chapter, Fesko sums up the Reformed understanding of baptism as a sacrament:

The covenantal context of the sacraments dictates that they are not merely human pledges or oaths. The sacraments do not bring regeneration automatically to the recipient. They do not convey infused grace or habits. Neither Christ nor His church is a sacrament. The sacraments are signs and seals of the covenant of grace that points to Christ and the Holy Spirit and their respective works. They do not work faith, but instead reinforce it, as a wedding ring reinforces love (Bavinck 4.489). They are visible words that function in the same manner as the invisible words of God. Just as the Word of God is double-edged, so too are the sacraments - they hold out covenant blessing and sanction. The difference between the reception of blessing or sanction depends on the presence or absence of faith in the recipient.

Fesko, pg. 304-307

A Revealing Exchange

2011-10-15T14:57:00.004-05:00

Stellman: It sounds. I’m going to move on to another quote here. But the fact that you insist that I am asking you in disguise, about the active obedience of Christ being imputed, is telling because I’m quoting the confessional language that the - - that the obedience and satisfaction of Christ are imputed to us. And you’re saying, well, that’s just code for the imputation of active obedience.

Leithart: No. I’m - - I’m saying that I agree with the Confession. I’ve said that in direct. And you’re disputing that I agree with it. And your dispute that I agree with it is based on your convictions about imputation of active obedience.

Stellman: Alright. The protestant doctrine has been too rigid in separating justification and sanctification, more rigid certainly than scripture itself. Justification and definitive sanctification are not merely simultaneous nor merely twin effects of the single event of union with Christ though I believe this is the case. Rather, they are the same act. Yes or no. Do you dis- - do you agree with Dr. Horton who says that affirming that definitive sanctification and justification are the same act is, in fact, collapsing justification and sanctification because definitive sanctification is much more related to sanctification which is what the term our Confession uses than it is to justification. Do you agree with him when he says that what you’re saying here is amounts to a collapsing of the two concepts together.

Leithart: If - - if I can add to my yes or no answer. It’s a collapsing but it’s a collapsing that I think Paul is doing.

Stellman: So, do you think Paul was, was, was a, would have been uncomfortable with our confessional language on this point?

Leithart: Paul certainly uses justify at least in Romans 6:7 in a way that we don’t.

Stellman: So, I’ll take that as a yes.

PNWP Leithart Trial Transcript, Pg. 202-203

More Free Kindle Books (Hodge, Turretin, Calvin...)

2011-10-14T08:32:00.004-05:00

A friend of the blog, Zack, has done something similar to me and begun creating his own Kindle books for personal use. He has given me permission to share them for the rest of you to download. You can pay Zack a visit at his blog, The Stranded Scholar, where he has lots of other more scholarly free resources. For me, the highlight is definitely being able to have Hodge's 3 Volume systematic theology tucked away and searchable in my skinny little Kindle.

Abstract of Systematic Theology by James Petigru Boyce

Institutes of the Christian Religion (Beveridge Translation) by John Calvin

The Scriptures by Francis Turretin

Systematic Theology (3 Volumes) by Charles Hodge

Comparison: 2007 FV Report vs. PNW SJC Leithart Ruling

2011-10-13T20:37:00.003-05:00

Point 7 of the FV Report says:

The view that one can be ‘united to Christ’ and not receive all the benefits of Christ’s mediation, including perseverance, in that effectual union is contrary to the Westminster Standards. (Emphasis Added)

Now look at this section from the SJC’s Leithart Ruling:

The Court finds Dr. Leithart’s views on union with Christ and apostasy to be in accord with the Standards (SJC Ruling, p. 25.4ff.)...Dr. Leithart does believe that some who are united with Christ will not persevere in faith and so will not be saved (Trial Transcript, p. 178.12ff.).

Why Federal Vision Will Never Be Successfully Prosecuted in the PCA

2011-10-13T06:30:00.000-05:00

From the PNWP SJC Judgment and Reasoning:

What of Dr. Leithart’s statement that the difference between the covenant in the garden and the covenant of grace is not soteriological? (Quotation a, Charge 2) The Court agrees that this was extremely problematic language, and in fact contradicted by Dr. Leithart’s own clear statements that there are very significant differences in the way in which humans maintain or gain favor with God in the garden and since. The Court is happy, therefore, to note that Dr. Leithart has agreed that it was a poor choice of words and has retracted the statement (Defense Brief, p. 4). The Court is heartened by this example of a man admitting a mistake and correcting it; the Court feels this happens far too seldom in our circles and we commend this example to all our brothers.

This statement was not a mere slip of the pen. It's not like he meant to write "hypothetical" and instead wrote "soteriological." That would be what you might call a "mistake" (and a very strangely executed mistake). Rather, this statement of Dr. Leithart's was problematic because it indeed strikes at the vitals of the system of doctrine contained in the Westminster Confession. Maybe someone can answer this question for me - does Leithart's recantation at this point simply erase the statement from the record? It is, after all, part of the reason why the prosecution was led to believe that Dr. Leithart taught contrary to the Standards in the first place. I am as heartened to hear him recant this statement as anyone, but there is still a whole system of doctrine behind it that made it possible and even reasonable for him to make the statement in the first place. Am I the only person whom this strategy strikes as being evasive?

The judgment of the PNWP states the following:

First, as TE David F. Coffin, Jr. recently wrote for the GA SJC in SJC Case 2010-04, Complaint of TE Art Sartorius, et al. vs. Siouxlands Presbytery: “If a view can be interpreted in an orthodox fashion, it ought to be so interpreted until one is forced to do otherwise.” Likewise, “One cannot properly impute implications that are drawn from a position to a person who expressly denies the implication.”

Over at Stellman's blog, Dean has hit the rhetorical nail on the proverbial head:

How many cases in church history had to endure this insurmountable hurdle? How many prosecutors would have won under these terms?

So Leithart (and every other defendant) is always, from the get-go able to wiggle out from under any and every implication which puts him in a difficult corner. Per Coffin's statement, if Leithart denies the implications drawn by the prosecution of one of his views, the Presbytery will have to accept the defendant's assessment of the implications of his own views or else, if backed into a corner, retract the troubling statement.

Talk about an impossible position.

The Trial of Peter Leithart Now Available as Kindle Book

2011-10-12T08:20:00.002-05:00

My special thanks to the Pacific Northwest Presbytery for making the trial documents available for the public. The first thing I did was to set about creating a readable Kindle formatted version of the documents. As a whole, the document is 700+ pages. Those who actually plan to read all of this would have a great deal of eye-strain.

The eBook can be downloaded here.

I included this notice at the beginning of the file:

This Kindle book was created for informational, but not official purposes. Row numberings have been removed from many of the documents included below because of the nature of the Kindle to keep numbers from being scattered throughout the text and to make all of the documents more readable. This makes citing specific passage (especially in the trial transcript) a challenge and is evidence that any official usage of this information ultimately should come from the original court documents. An active table of contents has been added at the beginning so that the documents can be easily navigated. Some of the larger documents have their own sub-tables of contents. This would be especially true of the trial transcript which clocked in at nearly 200+ pages, single-spaced. This eBook is neither officially sanctioned or commissioned by the PNW Presbytery but nevertheless reflects the full content that has been released. The original files which this eBook used as source material can be found at the Pacific Northwest Presbytery's web page, http://www.pnwp.org, and more specifically http://www.pnwp.org/index.php/notices/leithart-trial.

My thanks to the Pacific Northwest Presbytery for making this information available to the public.

Free Kindle Book: Robert L. Dabney's Systematic Theology

2011-10-10T23:30:00.003-05:00

"...he was not only a Calvinist in name, but in fact, that he knew why he was a Calvinist."

Download Dabney's Systematic Theology in Kindle format (Complete with working table of contents) by clicking here.

Lane Keister Testimony before PNWP in Kindle Format

2011-10-10T09:12:00.002-05:00

On Friday, Lane Keister made available his testimony before the Pacific Northwest Presbytery for download. It was a mammoth 45 pages of testimony, and so with his permission I created a Kindle version of his testimony for anyone who is interested in having an easier to read version for download. You can follow this link to download it.

In the future, once all of the documents of the trial are made public (fingers crossed) I will compile them all into one single file and make that available as soon as I'm able.

This Just In: No Such Thing as Federal Vision

2011-10-08T00:13:00.004-05:00

That's right, folks. False alarm. Do you remember that report which the GA of the PCA overwhelmingly adopted back in 2007 which roundly condemned the theological positions of the Federal Vision? Well we do, and as it turns out, nobody actually is Federal Vision.

Funny story... Turns out it was all just a big hoax. We apparently imagined/invented bogeymen who reject the bi-covenantal nature of the Westminster standards. We apparently imagined that there are people teaching that one is "elect" by virtue of being a member of the church. We apparently imagined that there are men out there teaching that union with Christ makes imputation redundant. The GA apparently made up a group of people who teach that baptism effects a "covenantal union" with Christ and that one can be united with Christ while not receiving all of the benefits which belong to Christ.

Given the fact that in the last few months, three teaching elders whose teachings fit well within the range of what the 2007 report defined as Federal Vision have all been exonerated, we can, I think, safely assume that this was an imagined threat, on par with those snipes that the older boy scouts made me chase in the dark when I was 12.

Leithart Declared Not Guilty by PNW Presbytery

2011-10-07T14:45:00.007-05:00

The news just broke earlier today that the Standing Judicial Committee of the Pacific Northwest Presbytery unanimously declared Peter Leithart not guilty of teaching Federal Vision theology. The presbytery then, according to the Aquila Report, approved of the ruling "overwhelmingly." Regarding how the votes broke down, Prosecutor Stellman says the following on his blog:

Concerning the voting, the commission's verdict on each of the five charges was voted on separately, with votes like 33-3-2 or 33-5 (in favor of the commission's not guilty verdict) being pretty representative.

The trial, which took place June 3-4 of this year, concluded with a gag order which was not lifted until earlier today.

TE Lane Keister and Michael Horton both testified at the trial, which was prosecuted by TE Jason Stellman. Stellman says that he will be sharing information on the trial in the near future (presumably via his blog) - although there are evidently limits to what Stellman is allowed to discuss publicly.

The Aquila Report has more information on the ruling here, and Lane Keister has some of his thoughts, along with his testimony here. Without any intention of impugning the elders within the PNW Presbytery, I must say I am bewildered. Those of us within the PCA who have even a cursory knowledge of the writings and teachings of Dr. Leithart cannot help but be stunned that any governing body which is under the Westminster Standards could rule that Dr. Leithart's views are in keeping with those standards.

To put it bluntly, if Peter Leithart does not exemplify and embody Federal Vision theology, then King David wasn't Jewish.

*Updated*

Wes White discusses what is next in the process at his blog. I recommend it, especially for the curious.

Blog Tour: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Jesus

2011-10-07T09:58:00.000-05:00

I have been invited by the fine folk from Baker Academic to participate in a blog tour for one of their new titles, A Hitchhiker's Guide to Jesus by Bruce N. Fisk. Let me say out the outset that this is a very clever book. The presentation of the material is done in a new and fresh way.

At its core, this volume is an introduction to the Gospels and the so-called "search for the historical Jesus." The book is laid out as the journal of a recent college graduate named Norm Adams, as he makes a journal through the Holy Land. The book is full of dialogue, pictures and even email correspondence will Norm's former Bible professor, as Norm moves through the places Jesus is said to have been. Along the journey Norm interacts with many notable New Testament scholars, such as James Dunn, Scott McKnight, and John Dominic Crossan. This book deals with some of the questions college students would be dealing with as they are introduced to many of the forms of Higher Criticism. Because of that, this book would seem to be a good text book for a college introduction class on the Gospels. The format and style would seem to appeal to to most students, even those who are being forced to take your course. The way that the author interweaves details of the Holy Land makes you feel, at times, like you are there. One thing is for sure, after reading this book any Bible student wants to visit the places described in these pages. The readers of this blog would like to know that Fisk takes a more historical/critical approach to the study of the Gospels, rather than a canonical approach. If this is kept in mind, most of the material in this guide to Jesus is solid.

Free Dan Phillips Book for the Kindle

2011-10-03T07:05:00.004-05:00

Dan Phillips, whom you may know as a regular contributor at Pyromaniacs, has a book, The World-Tilting Gospel which is currently available for free on the Kindle. You can get it by going here.

The first generation of Christians turned the world upside down. But the church today is being turned upside down by the world. Why? And why aren't we-with all our social medias and high-tech gadgets-more effectively producing Christ-centered, Gospel-liberated, biblically-instructed, world-tilting believers?

As always, I have no idea how long this book will be available for free, so grab it while you can.

NOTE: It is no longer free, of 10/9/11.

Dabney: Only Credible Professors May Partake of the Supper

2011-09-28T23:14:00.001-05:00

That this sacrament is to be given only to credible professors, does not indeed follow necessarily from the fact that it symbolizes saving grace; for baptism does this; but from the express limitation of Paul, and from the different graces symbolized. Baptism symbolizes those graces which initiate the Christian life: The Supper, those also which continue it. Hence, while the former is once applied to infants born within the covenant, to ratify their outward membership, in the dependence on the gracious promise that they shall be brought to commence the Christian life afterwards; it would be wrong to grant the second sacrament to any who have not given some indication of an actual progress in spiritual life.

-R.L. Dabney Systematic Theology Chapter 42

Have We Missed the "Gospel"?

2011-09-22T12:50:00.000-05:00

In his latest book titled The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, Scot McKnight says we have. He says that "we've got the gospel wrong, or at least our current understanding is only a pale reflection of the gospel of Jesus and the apostles" (24). The gospel that McKnight thinks we, as evangelicals, have wrong is the gospel of justification by faith. McKnight does not want to deny justification by faith, but he does not think it is the gospel. "The Calvinist crowd in the USA...has defined the gospel in the short formula 'justification by faith'" (25). And it is this gospel of justification by faith that McKnight sets up as his foil.

What does McKnight offer in the place of this "wrong headed gospel"? To answer this question he starts with Paul’s summary statement of the life of Jesus found in 1 Corinthians 15 and then moves to the the Creeds of the Church and then he ends with a return to Jesus in the Gospels and Acts. In essence, his view is that the the death and resurrection of Jesus are the consummation of the story of Israel and that this is the gospel. He argues that "the book of Acts reveals that gospeling was not driven by the salvation story or the atonement story. It was driven by the Story of Israel, and in fact makes most sense in that story” (134, emphasis original). He goes on to state that "neither Peter nor Paul focuses on God's wrath when they evangelize in Acts, nor do they describe the saving Story of Jesus as an escape from hell" (135, emphasis original).

What are we to think of McKnight's proposal? First, it is true that the death and resurrection of Jesus are central to the gospel. Without these divine acts there is no gospel. However, what makes this message "good news"? In other words, why is the death and resurrection of Jesus good news to anyone? What is it about the death and resurrection of a Jewish Rabbi that is good news for anyone? The answer is found in what Jesus' death and resurrection accomplished, that is, in salvation. The very thing that McKnight wants to distance the gospel from. It is true that some might have over emphasized the salvation aspect of the gospel (as a few of the stories McKnight tells in the book pp. 25-26), but the solution to this over emphasis is not to remove salvation from the gospel.

Second, as McKnight himself points out, the preaching of the gospel in Acts does have aspects of judgment. For example, Acts 17:29-31 speaks of the fact that God will one day judge the world. It is the fact that Jesus removes us (or saves us) from this judgment that makes the whole gospel good news. Also, in Acts 24:25 Paul reasoned about the coming judgment. Further, Romans contains a few examples of wrath and judgment that are linked with the gospel. For instance, in Romans Paul begins his discussion by stating that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth" (Romans 1:18). This declaration of God's wrath follows right after Paul introduces the gospel (Romans 1:16-17). Thus, it seems that for Paul, the wrath of God is the (or at least a) starting place for the gospel. Also, In Romans 2:16 Paul links the gospel with God's judgment when he writes "...on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus."

So what is the gospel? I think McKnight has part of it right, it is the fact that God took on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ to die a sinner's death and that he rose from the dead to prove his claims true and usher in the new creation. But this by itself is not good news, unless it is for me. That is why the full gospel is that Jesus did all of this for sinners. So sinners would not have to face the wrath and judgment of God. Jesus did all he did in the place of sinners; he died for sinners; he lived a perfect life for sinners; he rose again for sinners. And by faith alone all Jesus did is counted as all I did. This is the good news of the gospel. And this is what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15. He writes, "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins." That gospel is not just what Jesus did, it is that, but it is also what Jesus did for us.

Baker Give Away

2011-09-18T10:45:00.001-05:00

The Tale of the Suicidal Turtle

2011-09-18T06:30:00.007-05:00

Yes, more Walker Percy...

Speaking of the failure of the modern scientific age, Percy in his essay "The Delta Factor" speaks of man's unique position, not as homo sapien but as homo loquens, man the talker. Alone among animals, humans speak constantly and unceasingly. Modern scientists only see man as an organism in an environment, but as I shared earlier, man behaves like anything other than this (just look at how miserable people are, even in good environments).

But scientists, though their enterprise is doomed from the beginning, must batton down the hatches and dig in their heels.

Accordingly, it did not strike anyone as peculiar when scientists sought an explanation for man's perversity and upsidedownness in this or that atavism from man's evolutionary past. Man blamed beasts for his madness. Next, it seemed natural to look for the source of man's "aggressive" behavior in the aggression and "territoriality" of more primitive species...even though no...creature but man has been observed to wage war against itself (suicide) or against its own kind (war).

Curious, I took advantage of my modern age and used the internet to look for people who do think that animals commit suicide (I knew somebody must believe it). I was not disappointed.

One article, by Stefan Anitei, "Do Animals Commit Suicide?" says from the beginning that it is hard to really know if animals commit suicide, but then goes on to argue that they do, anyway. The entire article is a series of anecdotes which tell us more about the author than about the behavior of animals. If you enjoy Milo and Otis-style articles filled with anthropomorphic animal tales, this article will quite fit your fancy. The highlight of the article is actually the comments section, which I have a hard time taking seriously. Here is a standout written by "Brad":

I happen to know that animals DO commit suicide, and quite often... In fact I used to have a pet turtle who is my living proof. It enjoyed watching movies with me, some of its favorite's were films like Forest Gump, and Kill Bill. One day we watched Requrium [sic] For A Dream, and instantly after the movie, it crawled to its fake log in its cage, lifted it, then slammed it down on its neck, resulting in a catastrophic paralysis injury. I then had no other choice but to batter it with a heavy spoon to put it out of its own misery. Animals DO commit suicide.

Hilarious as this story might seem, I believe the author is sincere. Look at this response I found a little further down the page.

wow truly emotional brad..... yea wow. Animals have feelings like humans. People tend to think since animals are not so complex as us that they are less superior therefore less capable of emotions. Also that animals follow a daily ritual everyday. Just because they dont have a civilization or just because they dont have as many genes as us. does that mean they arent as complex as us? If you think about it, some animals minds work just like us. just because they cant speak a language or do other things like us dosnt mean that they are not capable of feeling emotions. cats and dogs show great emotion. if you have a dog or a cat when you are down about something (my cats atleast) will jump up on my lap and start purring and loving on me because they sense depresion. they obvioulsy can point it out so why do we think that they arent capiable to feeling it. thus deppression is the leading emotion to suicide in humans. So if animals can reconize depression and feel depression whats stopping them. plus we can argue that humans are animals too. just because we get out of the "state of nature" dosnt mean we arent animals, or mamals we are apart of them and they are apart of us.

Brilliantly, this comment by "vash" illustrates the absurdity of modern man which Percy is addressing. Professing to be unique among the animals for his ability to "get out of the 'state of nature'," vash still says that we are animals. There is nothing tongue-in-cheek about vash's response to the tale of the suicidal turtle. These people really believe that this turtle is capable of comprehending the crushing depth of man's lostness illustrated in Requiem and then responding with existential hopelessness by devising a mechanism of crushing its own skull.

If ever Percy needed help substantiating his claim that "Man blames beasts for his madness," Brad and Vash have done it for him.

I wonder if an internet search might find someone who believes that animals tell tales to one another of their human masters committing suicide...

Another (less fanciful) article on the subject from Time Magazine

Emphasizing Self-Knowledge in Apologetics

2011-09-15T09:24:00.006-05:00

"Know thy self."
-Socrates

I have recently become increasingly aware of the importance of self-knowledge - primarily as a result of my new infatuation with the writings of Walker Percy. I wanted to share a series of quotes dealing with self-knowledge and man's inability to find himself apart from God. I'll begin with a quote from Walker Percy's magnificent book Lost in the Cosmos. This quote alone has had such a profound impact on my own life, in existential terms, which I find difficult to describe. It's been about a month since I first read it, and I continue to be grateful for having read it:

The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one’s own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection! Yet not really amazing, for only if the abstracted ghost has an erection can it, like Jove spying Europa on the beach, enter the human condition.

How empty are our pursuits of pleasure! If they do not find their root in God, then they are meaningless and we remain lost in the cosmos.

Many do not like Kierkegaard because of his high philosophical language and because of his "leap of faith" approach to apologetics, which one may or may not see much virtue in. Kierkegaard was a Lutheran, however, and understood that human antipathy against God lies at the heart of all human problems. For all of his faults he was a great thinker and had a profound grasp of the human condition. In this age of alienation, despair, and lostness, modern man could do worse than to grasp the reality of what Kierkegaard understood about the self and despair.

The human being is essentially spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the self? In short, the self is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. The self is the conscious unity of these factors, which relates to itself, whose task is to become itself. This, of course, can only be done in relationship to God, who holds the synthesis together. When is despair completely eradicated? It occurs when the self, in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, is grounded nakedly in the power that established it. In other words, when it is related openly to and dependently on God. To transcend despair is neither to become finite nor to become infinite but to become an individual in their synthesis, which God alone holds together. In so far as the self does not become itself in this way, it is not itself. And not to be oneself, as God created you, is despair.

Lest one think all this talk about self-knowledge sounds a bit to high and philosophical, I wanted to bring in the friend of all good Presbyterians, John Calvin. Calvin famously argued at the very beginning of his Institutes (1.1.1) that self-knowledge is crucial to Divine knowledge, and that Divine knowledge is the only thing which would make true self-knowledge possible.

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves...it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For (such is our innate pride) we always seem to ourselves just, and upright, and wise, and holy, until we are convinced, by clear evidence, of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity. Convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only, and not to the Lord also —He being the only standard by the application of which this conviction can be produced...But though the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are bound together by a mutual tie, due arrangement requires that we treat of the former in the first place, and then descend to the latter.

I believe it entirely possible that in our apologetics, we have - in terms of our language, in terms of our overall approach, so emphasized the objective truth of God's existence extra nous that we have neglected the one area where our fellow human beings cannot deny a lack in themselves. They do not understand themselves, and they hate the One who can make sense of their existence and self-hood.

It is patently obvious, though perhaps not scientifically provable, that human beings are, as Percy says, "something more than an organism in an environment, because for one thing he acts like anything but an organism in an environment." Is it possible that in reformed apologetics we have made the same mistake Percy says scientists are making, and that we are approaching the universe (and perhaps even God Himself) as a scientific observer rather than as one who is to "know and be known" by God?

Free Kierkegaard eBook

2011-09-14T21:57:00.003-05:00

Christendom is a society of people who call themselves Christians because they occupy themselves with obtaining information about those who a long time ago submitted themselves to Christ's examination - spiritlessly forgetting that they themselves are up for examination.

-Soren Kierkegaard, as quoted in Provocations - The Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

Get the free eBook here.

The (Wo)Men Without Chests

2011-09-13T23:20:00.004-05:00

You can read the original story here. What interests me is the practical appearance of what C.S. Lewis predicted as the rise of "men without chests." What Lewis meant by this term was human beings who did not only deny the Natural Law in practice (everyone does that) but also in principle. Denying the reality of the Natural Law, human beings will still be expected to obey right and wrong, yet without the internal motive or drive to do so.

Look at the criminal in this case, Teonna Brown:

"I’m sorry. My mother did not raise me like this. I would really like to apologize to the victim, Miss Chrissy Polis."

It is doubtlessly the most heartfelt, passionate apology given since Nixon was impeached. Look at the victim's response to this obviously forced apology:

"I felt like I was going to die that day...I continue to suffer seizures, bouts of crying, mental anguish and anxiety. I fear being alone. I have flashbacks about the attacks. I do not forgive them for what they did to me."

One can hardly blame Ms. Polis for her unwillingness to forgive. It is difficult enough to accept a heartfelt apology in a case like this, let alone an apology that was likely composed by an accountant during his lunch break. However, when we consider that Ms. Brown seems not to really believe an apology is called for, and when we consider Ms. Polis' unforgiving approach to the entire situation, it is hard to imagine that this conflict is not a microcosm of what Western Civilization is coming to. Two parties who believe in their own rights, but not in either the virtue of a true apology, nor in the virtue of forgiving one's enemies.

I know that it is a cliche to deride the immorality of Western Culture, and so having said my piece I will now slink back into the cave.

More Than an Organism

2011-09-12T22:41:00.003-05:00

Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? ... Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? ... Why do more people commit suicide in San Francisco, the most beautiful city in America, than in any other city? ... Why is the good life which men have achieved in the twentieth century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders, can divert one from the sadness of ordinary mornings? ...

Man knows he is something more than an organism in an environment, because for one thing he acts like anything but an organism in an environment. Yet he no longer has the means of understanding the traditional Judeo-Christian teaching that the 'something more' is a soul somehow locked in the organism like a ghost in a machine. What is he then? He has not the faintest idea. Entered as he is into a new age, he is like a child who sees everything in his new world, names everything, knows everything except himself.

-Walker Percy, The Message in The Bottle, Page 9

Arguments for the Continuing Validity of the Decalogue

2011-09-11T22:34:00.003-05:00

I have been helping co-teach a small group at our church where we have made the Ten Commandments the subject of study. What follows are basically my notes for the first lesson where I argued that the Ten Commandments are not relics of a bygone legalistic era, but that they are, rather, gracious gifts from God to His church for her edification and sanctification. Our Assistant Pastor, Rick Franks, taught the first part of the lesson where he argued that Christians are still under the law - though not as a means of being justified. In the second part of the lesson, I argued that the Ten Commandments do stand apart from the rest of the Old Testament law as something unique and persistent.

--------------------------------

With so many rules and laws in the Old Testament, why put such a special emphasis on the ten commandments? What about the many other commands throughout the Old Testament?

1. The Ten Commandments are a summary of the natural law in creation and therefore cannot be abolished or pushed to the side.

All ten commandments in one way or another are taught or implicit before the giving of the tablets of Sinai. This means that even if the Mosaic law were completely done away with, then the ten would still be a part of humanity's moral fabric.

(1) "No other Gods" (Ex. 15:11; Gen. 6:9) was implicit by the OT approval of those who walked with God, who worshipped only the Lord. Even the serpent's temptation to Eve was a temptation to set themselves up in God's place, therefore violating the first commandment.

(2) "No Idols" is already present in Genesis. As Philip Ross points out, the story from Gen. 31:34 where the menstrual woman is sitting on the idol is a "very sharp judgment on the unholiness and nothingness of this 'god'; a woman sat upon it in her uncleanness" (p 63). Also, at one point (Gen. 35:2) God commands Jacob to "Get rid of their foreign god."

(3) "Do not misuse the name of the Lord" is implicit whenever the name of the Lord is exalted or honored or sworn by in the pre-Mosaic fathers (Gen. 4:26; 24:3; 22:16).

(4) "Remember the sabbath" is referenced before the giving of the ten also. In Ex. 16:4-5 the people are told that they must collect enough mana and not to collect any on the seventh day. The narrative makes clear that the seventh day is to be "a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD" (16:23). God's complaint in 16:28 "How long will you refuse to keep my commands and instruction?", according to Ross, "implies knowledge of 'commands' and 'instructions' concerning the Sabbath." The greatest proof of the Sabbath, however, is that it is rooted in the creation account which specifically points to the seventh day as a day of rest for God who needs no rest. Clearly, then, the mention of the Sabbath day is not for God's sake, but for man's sake.

(5) "Honor your father and your mother" is demonstrably present before the giving of the ten as Noah's sons go with him into the ark (Gen. 7:7), and as Reuben and Judah plead with their father for Benjamin to come to Egypt (Gen. 42:29-43:13). Negatively, dishonoring one's parents is condemned in Gen. 9:20-27 when Ham is condemned for his disrespectful attitude towards his father's nakedness.

(6) "You shall not kill" is obviously present in the murder of Abel. If murder did not become a sin until the giving of the law at Sinai, then upon what moral grounds did God condemn Cain? Clearly the sixth commandment was part of the moral law given to all humanity before any written law. Recall, also, that Moses killed a man and sought to cover it up (Ex. 2:11-14). This was also before any law had been given to humanity. As Ross once again points out, "Murder was therefore a crime before Sinai, among the chosen people and in heathen nations."

(7) "Do not commit adultery" begins in the garden of Eden as Adam and Eve become united in a one-flesh union (Gen. 2:23-25). This is later pointed to by Jesus as the grounds upon which divorce ought not to happen. If divorce is forbidden by Adam and Eve's union in the Garden, then surely the breaking of that union by adultery was as well. Also, consider how Abraham allowed Sarah into Abimelech's house. What happened next is remarkable because God came to Abimelech in a dream and warned him not that "adultery is a transgression of the moral order - he knows that already - but so that he knows he will commit adultery if he touches Sarah (Gen. 20:3-7).

(8) "You shall not steal" is violated almost immediately when Adam and Eve stole fruit from God which they did not have any right to (although we'd be mistaken to reduce their sin to theft). Some major examples of theft before Sinai: Laban's defrauding of Jacob (Gen. 31:6-7), Rachel's theft of her father (31:19), and don't forget the episode involving Joseph's cup (Gen. 44). "Theft was in no sense acceptable before Israel heard the ten words" (p 73).

(9) "Do not bear false witness" immediately comes to mind when Adam passes the buck to Eve in the garden of Eden. After all, if he wasn't guilty then only Eve would have stood condemned in the Garden. Admittedly this is an indirect reference to lying, but it should be agreed that lying was a sin from the beginning. When Abraham lies to Abimelech about his wife, Abimelech the pagan lectures Abraham because Abraham was doing something "that ought not be done" (Gen. 20:9). Other events involved Sarah's lie in Gen. 18:15. Another is when Jacob recognizes that his deceit of his father to obtain the blessing would make him worthy of a curse (Gen. 27:12).

(10) "Do not covet" is also a command which is implicit in the fall narrative. The taking of the fruit was a desiring of something which Adam and Eve did not have a right to (Gen. 3:6). Geerhard von Rad observes also that Cain's murder of Abel sprang from his envy of God's pleasure in his brother. Joseph too experienced suffering at his brothers' hands when they coveted their father's affection from Joseph. Covetousness is a "constant theme" in the destruction of Abraham's family.

Natural Law was in place before Sinai:

(a) In Gen. 6:5 God judges the world because "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Clearly humanity lived under a moral law before the giving of the ten commandments. Once again, the moral law transcends the Sinai commandments.

(b) In Gen. 26:5 God says that "Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws." Ross notes that "This is the first time the Pentateuch uses those words, which are of considerable significance later." Another scholar writes, "This is no simple anachronism; it carries significance for understanding the place of the law in the pre-Sinai period."1

(c) Some scholars see significance in the fact that the ten commandments were given in a desert which was not understood to be owned by any particular nation. They argue that this emphasizes the transcendent and universal applicability of the ten commandments.

2. In the OT, the Ten Commandments are singled out as unique and distinct from the rest of the Old Testament laws.

(a) Deuteronomy 4:12-14 teaches not only that the ten commandments are important, but they are the covenant. Exodus 34:28 teaches the exact same thing. Clearly the ten commandments occupy a very important place right up front in Israel's history.

(b) Interestingly, the two tablets containing two copies of the commandments were kept in the ark rather than beside it as the law was. This emphasized the covenantal nature of the ten commandments as one copy was normally given to each party in ancient near eastern secular treaties. In the case of Israel, both tablets are kept together because the Lord himself will dwell with the Israelites.

(c) In Deuteronomy 5:22 it says: "These words the LORD spoke with a loud voice to your whole assembly, at the mountain, from the midst of the fire, the cloud and the thick darkness; and he added nothing more." This clause is a boundary marker so that an answer might be given to the one who might ask, "Why the ten commandments? Why isn't the rest of the law of Moses seen as unique and applicable in all times and places?"

(d) Ross offers his own summary of his argument that "the Pentateuch recognized the Decalogue as a distinct element within the law"

1. The ten were not a marked historical development or a new law.
2. God spoke these words.
3. These words came from the finger of God.
4. He added nothing to these words and no other part of the law had that 'binding foundation-scroll' status.
5. The rest of the law was not written in a form which was addressed to the individual throughout.
6. Only the ten commandments function as the 'constitution' upon which 'all else is but commentary.' Ultimately, it was the 'constitution of the universe.'

The OT laws were traditionally divided into civil, ceremonial, and moral laws. Thomas Aquinas offered Deuteronomy 4:13-14 as a prooftext for this division of the law.

I should also note that our own confession, the Westminster Confession, teaches that while the moral law (again, summarized in the ten commandments) is still in effect for the church today, the civil and ceremonial aspects of the law are no longer binding for the church. So it recognizes this same division.

19.3 “Beside this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly, holding forth divers instructions of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the new testament.”

19.4 “To them also, as a body politic, he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require.”

And so our own confession recognizes that while the moral law, which is summarized by the ten commandments, is still binding, the civil laws and ceremonial laws have "expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now."

3. The NT teaches that the Ten Commandments are still binding.

(a) Jesus did not change the law or his attitude to the law in any way during his life. Rather, as our Larger Catechism says, "Christ humbled himself in his life, by subjecting himself to the law, which he perfectly fulfilled."

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:17-19)

In all of the Gospels, Jesus is portrayed as keeping each and every commandment of the Old Testament and of teaching others to keep them, as well. Even Jesus' teachings on the Sabbath, which some point to as being a change from the "old order" were entirely in keeping with Old Testament teachings. When we get to the fourth commandment we will address this question, but in the meantime it is useful for us to note that Jesus' teaching is always in keeping with the Old Testament teachings.

1 Matthew 4:10
2 John 4:24
3 Matthew 5:33-37
4 Luke 23:56
5 Matthew 15:4; Luke 2:51
6 Matt. 5:21-6; 15:9; 19:3-9, 18
7 Matt. 5:27-32; 15:19; 19:3-9, 18
8 Matt. 5:19; 19:18
9 Matt. 5:33-37; 15:19; 19:18
10 Luke 12:15

(b) Jesus saw the Ten Commandments as an inseparable unit. In Mark 10:17 Jesus is talking with the rich young ruler and when the man asks how he might have eternal life, Jesus points to the ten commandments: "You know the commandments: 'Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.'" What is so brilliant is that Jesus references the ten by pointing to several of the ten, but not all of them. He does not have to - this young man would have known all ten commandments by heart.

(c) The Ten Commandments are all presented positively in the book of Acts (both explicitly and implicitly), even after Jesus' ascension.

1 Acts 4:11-12; 4:24; 12:22-23
2 Acts 7:42; 15:20, 29; 19:19
3 Acts 23:3
4 Acts 13:14, 44; 16:13; 17:2; 18:4
5 Acts 23:5; 25:6-12
6 Acts 7:51-53; 9:22-24; 21:30-31
7 Acts 15:20
8 Acts 5:4
9 Acts 5:1-11
10 Acts 20:33

(d) The Moral Law is never revoked. Elsewhere in the book of Acts (10:28), we find that Peter has a vision and is commanded by God to eat the unclean animals. In this event, God declares that the ceremonial (purity) laws of the Mosaic period are no longer binding. He does not revoke the moral laws. The Ten Commandments are NOT part of the ceremonial law. Rather, as we argued already, the Ten are a summary of the Natural Law which God has placed in the hearts of all men. Such a law cannot simply be revoked. However, many try to argue that of all the ten, only the Sabbath is part of the purity laws. Once again, this will be addressed when we discuss the fourth commandment. We must remember that the Ten are viewed by Moses, as well as by Jesus, as a unit, all written together, and to be obeyed without being separated from one another.

------------------------------------------------
Almost none of this lesson would have been possible without the aid of Philip Ross' book From the Finger of God. Many of the arguments in this lesson were taken straight from (or were summarized from) his book.

Is Instinct the Measure of Morality?

2011-09-08T07:15:00.008-05:00

AOL TV summarizes an interview with singer/actress Kristin Chernoweth, where she claims that "her staunch Christian beliefs are not at odds with her support for the gay community."

In an interview with 'The Advocate' Chenoweth says that people are born gay or straight, just like they're either tall or short, and that it's not a choice. In response to a question about people who cite Christianity as justification for passing discriminatory laws, she said "I would ask, 'What would Jesus do?'"

She added that, "It sounds so cliché and Pollyanna-ish, but I have a feeling if he were on the earth today, he wouldn't be walking around saying, 'You're going to hell' and 'You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.' I think he'd be accepting and loving."

Chenoweth continued, using her own tiny stature to illustrate her point. "What would I do if it was a sin to be short? That's the way God made me, so what could I do? Let's see, I could wear heels, I could tease my hair, and maybe on a good day I could be 5'1". But the bottom line is, I'm 4'11" and that's the way I was put together. And that's what I believe about homosexuals."

The example of "if it was a sin to be short" is of course, ridiculous. The fact is that there are lots of things that people believe are wrong even though people have a natural inclination to do them. From lusting in your heart after someone to the fact that by nature we enjoy stealing and talking about our neighbor behind their back, we are by nature sinners. Our natural condition or desire is no gauge for morality. I hate to drop a bomb like Lewis on Chernoweth's head, because she's such a sweet lady, but this notion that our natural desires are good and are the measure of goodness needs to be laid to rest once and for all. Take it, Lewis:

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

As far as I'm concerned, Christians ought to stop fighting the battle over whether or not some people are born with homosexual desires. Let us grant it. Supporters of the morality of homosexual behavior are still left in the position of defending a morality which is rooted in the human condition rather than in an external natural law. As Lewis says in the above quote from The Abolition of Man, this position is circular in nature.

72 Hour Sale on New Kevin DeYoung Book

2011-09-07T08:55:00.003-05:00

Westminster Bookstore is having a 72-hour sale on the new book by Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert. The book is The is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission. The book is new, and obviously I don't know much about it. However, at Westminster's page for the book you can look at the first sixty pages of the book. Also, Michael Horton has a pretty glowing blurb for the book, if those sorts of things help in the decision-making:

"Christ is the greatest message in the world, and delivering it is the greatest mission. But are we losing our focus? Are we being distracted, sometimes even by good things? Zealous Christians disagree sharply today over the church’s proper ministry and mission. Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert bring us back to first things in an age of mission creep and distraction. Offering balanced wisdom, this book will give us not only encouragement but discomfort exactly where we all need it. It’s the kind of biblical sanity we need at this moment."

The current special is, if you buy one copy of the book, you get it for 63% off ($5.99) and if you buy five or more copies, you get it for 69% off ($4.99). This is a good deal when you consider that this is no tiny book (300+ pages). The sale ends Saturday, Sept. 10th at 4:00 PM ET. Get the book here.

Walker Reviews Lexicon

2011-09-06T08:34:00.004-05:00

The Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism has a review of the Compact Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, edited by Mark House. The review was written by our own Josh Walker and may be of interest to many of you.

Did 9/11 Give Your Life Significance?

2011-09-06T07:12:00.007-05:00

In his book Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy discusses the fact that fallen humanity both need and desire violence in order to infuse common life with meaning. Much like Flannery O'Connor's fiction, many of Walker Percy's books involve characters who experience some sort of injury or violence, and that moment of violence creates a world of significance and escape from the boredom - at least for the moment.

Since 9/11 is coming up and it is en vogue to talk about it for the moment, permit me to offer an illustration. Most of us remember where we were when we learned that there was a terrorist attack on New York and Washington D.C. I was sitting next to my soon-to-be-wife during my freshman year of college, in a chapel session. Though it was horrific, there was something exhilarating about the thought that maybe - just maybe - the world was coming to an end. It suddenly felt that something was afoot - that there was something tremendously significant happening, and we were a part of it, and it was moving all around us in a way we didn't understand. Between our tears for the suffering and the dead, we felt alive again. This is a somewhat embarrassing truth because it makes us look callous and heartless, and we often care what other think about us. But this truth is also horrible, because it shows that we are not able to awaken ourselves from the malaise - from the joyless monotony. We emotionally need to be rescued from without by some unspeakable violence which few of us would admit that we need.

I hate to be too obvious, but it seems to me (and this seems to be Percy's answer, though he never says it explicitly) that the answer to humanity's permanent malaise has come in the death of Christ. Though this event took place thousands of years ago, it was arguably the most unjust, the most horrendous act of violence (spiritually and physically) which humanity ever committed or witnessed. If Christians are right that Christ was, Himself God, then their contention that Jesus was infinitely good makes the death of Christ infinitely horrible. As such, while events like 9/11 are horrible and are scarred onto us in a way that is unimaginable, the horror of it all is nothing compared to the evils and horrors of the death of Christ. His death was so rife with meaning and injustice that it still rings out, through the aeons, as the violent act which is alone truly capable of permanently shaking men from their malaise.

We have no grounds for boredom or laziness or meaninglessness or insignificance in a universe where Christ has been crucified. Those who find themselves in the malaise need only remind themselves of the bare facts of Christ's death on the cross before their soul and conscience is shocked to the core that a pure and innocent man should willingly die this ignominious, shameful, and violent death. Just as men said to one another, "Did you hear about the twin towers?" in order to feel alive again, men ought just as well to shock one another by something as simple as, "Did you know that the anointed one, the Holy One, the Messiah, died as a naked crook?" If our consciences were working properly, we would never cease weeping at the thought that the innocent Lord of Heaven and Earth hung naked on a piece of wood, despised by his Father and cursed by his people. Because Christ died, we know that forever, something is afoot - something is happening. And we know that it is a bigger deal than 9/11 felt like when it happened.

This may be the greatest testimony of man's wickedness - that upon hearing of Christ, we often respond with a careless yawn and feigned interest. It is no wonder that man has become bored with sex, bored with violence, bored with amusements - bored with himself. His own conscience is barely roused to cognitive wakefulness by the deepest dreadfulness the universe has ever known. If the death of Christ will not shock man out of the doldrums, then what makes him think that watching a person being mutilated on television or a children's hospital being blown up abroad via the news will barely more than increase his circulation?

Natural Law's Diversity: Moral Advances vs. Moral Innovations

2011-09-05T21:49:00.004-05:00

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis spends a great deal of time defending the notion of Natural Law. As we have been bemoaning for some time, the notion of Natural Law has largely been largely lost in the Reformed theological world. One of the complaints which is often heard from those who might seek to downplay the significance of Natural Law is: "which one?" Which version of natural law, in other words, is the Natural Law? "If we lump together," Lewis asks, "the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find many contradictions and some absurdities? I admit all this."

Lewis' solution to these difficulties, is to argue for a distinction between "a real moral advance" and a "real moral innovation." He argues that Christ's Golden Rule is an advance from something such as Confucius' "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." However, he argues that Nietzsche's ethic is an "innovation" which does not fit within Natural Law because it rejects its classically acknowledged contents.

But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man who says to us: 'You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?' and a man who says, 'Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.'

And so the bigger picture answer offered by Lewis - in a very barebones form - is to suggest that, of course, the Natural Law is objective and fixed, but that its application to each society is, to a certain degree, flexible (within a certain allowable range). To step outside of the range is to innovate. Those who stay within the range are making progress.

Modifications and advances in Natural Law are found throughout almost all societies. In fact, all societies which believed in objective right and wrong do have some variations in their laws (especially, Calvin points out, in each society's sanctions against lawbreakers), but these are differences of degree and not contradictions. Wherever contradictions exist, someone has legislated against the Natural Law. Humanity needs moral advances, not Nietzsche-esque innovations.

Christian Thoughts on Penn Jillette's Book God, No!

2011-09-01T05:00:00.001-05:00

I'm trying to figure out how to talk about Penn Jillette's new book God, No!. After all, this is a Christian blog, and lets face it - Penn Jillette has a propensity towards colorful language. You don't, for the most part, quote him in mixed company. Couple that with the fact that he is a self-described hard-core atheist (he doesn't even believe that other people believe in God) and you might wonder why I'm talking about his new book.

[Tangent: Penn seems to think that if people really believed in God, it would keep them from sinning. "It’s hard to believe people believe in god. If people really believed in god, how could they ever sin?" Maybe Penn is easily controlled by fear, but if the Bible teaches us anything it's that fear of Hell is not enough. End of tangent.]

The fact is, I like Penn Jillette. I am what he would describe as a totally insane, wacky Christian fundamentalist, and yet here I am reading his new book. It's because I like him. I think I see Penn Jillette as my non-Christian doppleganger. I mean, the man is a big, loud, opinionated, awkwardly shaped Libertarian, and he loves truth. We are more alike than we are different, in my opinion. And so I've felt an odd kinship from a distance with the man for - oh, the last ten years or so, I guess.

Last year I was in Las Vegas for a convention related to my job and as I walked around Vegas I hoped to myself that I might catch a glimpse of Penn Jillette. And you know what? Our convention put on a Brian Setzer orchestra concert and it just so happened that Penn Jillette was there, for free, juggling broken wine glasses and doing a pretty funny schtick all the while. It was such a thrill to see him in person. I even took a picture (left). If I could have found a way to do it and not seem like a stalker, I would have gone up to him and shaken his hand and told him I was a huge fan. But... it didn't happen. I wouldn't have known where to find him after the Brian Setzer show anyway.

So here I am with this book. I read it. It's dirty. Okay? I won't recommend it to 99% of my friends. If you aren't gaga for Jillette and don't just really love the guy, then my advice is, there are a lot better ways to spend your money. Yes, Penn is very funny and thoughtful. But uh... there are tales in here that will curl your toes if you have anything approaching scruples. He actually has a chapter in the book which is basically a letter that he wrote to Penthouse magazine a few years ago. Yes, I skipped that chapter at a certain point. But a few of the other ones weren't any more wholesome. (There is a tale involving a hairdryer that will change the way you see Wendy's hamburgers, lets just put it that way.)

So why? Why read it? Well, I was interested in the book for its atheism content, mostly. If the book was really just a bunch of dirty stories, I probably would have passed. The fact is, I really think Penn has some things to teach Christians. And even if Christians don't appreciate what he has to say, it's important that we read atheists so that we know who we're talking about. Also, I like to laugh, and I knew Penn would deliver. I know it would bother him to no end that Christians might just read his book and mine it for quotes to "rally the masses" as it were (that may be why he included so much profanity - so we'd be scared to quote it), but that's exactly what I plan to do. See, the fact is, Jillette is a pretty honest guy and he calls things the way he sees them, and in truth, he seems to "get" evangelism. We actually posted a video from Penn Jillette about three years ago. In the book he discusses his annoyance that fundamentalist Christian churches, organizations, and blogs used this same video to drum up evangelism efforts and mobilize the masses. He says nobody asked his permission to use the video except for Campus Crusade for Christ. Anyway, the video has now been made unwatchable on Youtube, but he basically shares the same message from the video in the book. He says that proselytizing is a moral thing and that whatever your view of things is, you must share it if it is true.

If our Charlie really believed that there was everlasting life through Jesus Christ, piggies, or L. Ron Hubbard, how can he not proselytize? How can it be moral to be politely quiet about something that important? If our life here is really just a brief vale of tears and the real joy is after we croak off the mortal coil, if someone really truly believes all that like ice like fire, don’t they have to preach to everyone all the time?

But there's a very real flipside:

Atheists are also morally obligated to tell the truth as we see it. We should preach and proselytize too. We need to help believers. Someone who believes in god is wasting big parts of his or her life, holding back science and love, and giving “moral” support to dangerous extremists. If you believe something, you must share it; it’s one of the ways we all learn about truth.

I should pause to say, this book fits right alongside the other books in the corpus of works by the New Atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins, et al) where there is more ad hominem and name calling than actual logic in defense of atheism going on here. I think this may, in part, be the nature of this book. The book is so rife with foul language and sexual content that Jillette almost certainly believe this book is preaching to the choir, because only the choir would read it. After all, why would some crazy fundie actually read this book? Anyway, there are not many arguments, if any, against Christianity. Jillette knows that Christianity is a superstitious, silly, baseless religion, and because of that, he is logically free to speak as he wants and tell the lewdest stories he can manage. For that fact alone, there is little to critique, since you can't critique name-calling. Needless to say, this book is not a serious apologetic for atheism. It is, for Jillette, a celebration of the freedom and meaning which he sees in his worldview.

The book is really just a series of vignettes which are not connected to one another. Jillette writes about growing up in a Christian home and being asked by the pastor to stop attending youth group because he was turning the kids into atheists. He ruminates on what it is to be in a business partnership with Teller. He discusses his rivalry with The Amazing Kreskin. He talks about Sigfried and Roy and what a classy pair of magicians they were even though he mocked them publicly whenever he had the chance. He talks quite a bit about his Libertarian political views and spends a great deal of time ripping on the TSA, which I quite enjoyed.

He has an interesting and hilarious anecdote about encountering the 'masked magician' who supposedly ruined tricks for magicians everywhere with his specials on FOX (it didn't even phase Penn). Most interestingly, he discusses magicians and their philosophy of magic. He despises performers like Kreskin, David Blaine, and Criss Angel who try to convince people that they have some sort of 'other worldly' powers behind their acts. He does connect this to Christians who cheapen their message by turning even the Gospel into a silly hat-trick.

It’s always astonished me how any magician can be spiritual. There are hippie magicians who do drum circles in the woods and then do a card force and a false shuffle and think they’re expressing something real. “Imagine a universe so limitless and yet so all-connected that you chose the three of clubs!” There are even “gospel magicians” who’ll do a cheesy “cake in the hat” trick and tie it to the resurrection of zombie Christ: “And god so loved the world that he gave his only son our lord and savior to die for our sins and give us this chocolate cupcake out of your baseball hat!” It seems like depicting the most important event in one’s philosophy with a $19.95 trick from a joke shop cheapens it a bit. Again, I guess I agree completely.

Jillette also falls right into line with the New Atheists when it comes to defining atheism. It used to be that atheists believed that God doesn't exist, but now it is very, very common to hear atheists define themselves more along the lines of what we think of as agnosticism.

Being an atheist means you don’t believe in god. When someone asks if god exists and you humbly say “I don’t know,” you’ve answered the question honestly. Once you’ve answered “I don’t know” to the existence of a god, the answer to whether you believe in god pretty much has to be no. That doesn’t mean you’re saying it’s impossible for there to be a god, or that we couldn’t have evidence of a god in the future. It just means that right now you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you can’t believe. Believing cannot rise out of “I don’t know.”

Lest you think he is really just an agnostic in disguise, you should think differently. He has strong words for so-called "agnostics":

“Agnostic” is often peddled as the gentler, more measured version of atheist, but I can’t see it that way. It doesn’t fool anyone. When someone hedges, we all know what he or she means. Most “agnostics” are really just cowardly and manipulative atheists.

Penn goes on.

Religious people aren’t as stupid as “agnostics” think (no one could be). Believers can smell a godless loser who doesn’t even have the guts to answer a question from half the length of purgatory away. An outright lie shows more respect than a dodge. If you’re going to lie, get down on your knees, pretend to praise god, and rot the faith from the inside like the worm that you are.

I saw a recent poll that said 1 in 6 pastors in Dutch churches is an atheist, so it sounds like some people have the same idea as Penn.

There is a laugh-out-loud moment near the end of the book that I really enjoyed. Penn is talking about how he and Teller will discuss pretty much anything on their Showtime series, regardless of who they offend. However, they do have their limits.

But we’re careful with Muslims. Again: Christopher Hitchens said, “There are no atheist martyrs.” That’s good thinking. If Penn & Teller were ever going to seriously punk a religion, we’d pick the Amish. F*** them all and the nonviolent horse and buggy they rode in on.

One point which I hope Penn's readers will not miss is that Jillette appears to believe emphatically in an objective morality. This is perhaps the weakest aspect of Jillette's worldview because it would be impossible, I think, given his trenchant moral condemnations of evil in the world (much like Hitchens' God is Not Good) for Jillette to retreat into relativism if pressed. And yet the atheistic worldview cannot account for universal, invariant, and nonphysical moral laws. My guess is that Jillette would answer that there is nothing wrong with answering "I don't know" to such a challenge.

In the end, this review of Penn's new book was pretty sporadic, because the book itself is sporadic. I don't recommend it to anybody, simply in terms of its language and sexual content. There is good and funny stuff in this book, don't get me wrong, but you have to wade through an awful lot of things that almost any God-fearing believer wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. The truth is, I need to go detox after reading this. It's going to be the Apostle Paul and Walker Percy for me.

Walker Percy Interviews Himself

2011-08-31T22:30:00.001-05:00

I'm already on a big and annoying Walker Percy kick, so why not keep it up a bit more? This is from a longer post at Mockingbird. Walker Percy interviewed himself. Here is part of the exchange.

Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?

A: Yes.

Q: Why?

A: It’s not good enough.

Q: Why not?

A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

Q: Grabbed aholt?

A: A Louisiana expression.

Peter Kreeft on Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos

2011-08-31T05:00:00.001-05:00

Back in the 90s Peter Kreeft gave a talk at the C.S. Lewis Institute where he discussed C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man and compared it to Walker Percy's magnificent mock self-help book Lost in the Cosmos. Since I recently finished Percy's book, I was greatly interested in what Kreeft might have had to say.

At on point, Kreeft half-jokes with his audience that, in his opinion, Western Civilization could be saved if everyone read six books:

Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy
The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

In the talk, Kreeft makes a strong case that the first two books form the preconditions for the other six, and Huxley's book shows us what a future full of "men without chests" would really look like. This talk may actually make Percy readers out of many of you, and it is a really tremendous discussion, and it comes with my highest recommendations. Since reading The Moviegoer and Lost in the Cosmos I have begun reading Percy's book Love in the Ruins, which envisions a dystopian future full of "men without chests" where humanity is trying to find its way out of the rubble. I'm only still in the first chapter, but it is a great book with perhaps the greatest opening sentence I've ever read in any novel.

NOW IN THESE DREAD LATTER DAYS of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

You can download Kreeft's talk in mp3 format here.

Free Geerhardus Vos eBook for Kindle

2011-08-30T08:44:00.004-05:00

The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology by Geerhardus Vos has been made available for free at Monergism for download in Kindle format. Even the first paragraph is a gem:

At present there is general agreement that the doctrine of the covenants is a peculiarly Reformed doctrine. It emerged in Reformed theology where it was assured of a permanent place and in a way that has also remained confined within these bounds. It is true that towards the end of the seventeenth century this doctrine was taken over by several Lutheran theologians,2 but this apparently took place by way of imitation, the doctrine being unknown within the genuine Lutheran framework. With the Reformed theologians, on the other hand, its emergence occurs in the period of richest development. With full force it lays hold of theological thinking, which in many cases it bends in a distinctive direction.

Get it here.

A Tribute to my Uncle Jerry

2011-08-30T05:00:00.002-05:00

My family growing up was Christian. It was my father who kept our family's religious commitments together. When my father had a downtime spiritually, we would go weeks (months?) without attending church. When my father was feeling reinvigorated, we would find a new church and stick with it for a long time. I am quite convinced that my father was the spiritual center of my family, and even though he was a profoundly imperfect man, he still loved God and prayed for his children. He brought us up the best he could, and he sought to share his love for God with me as well.

When I was about 14 or 15, I had an experience at church camp where I was essentially forced to speak in tongues and I subsequently faked it because of the pressure that was put on me. After that experience, I drifted from God and became a self-styled atheist and skeptic. Around 17 or so, I started to study cosmology and history, eventually I devoted my life to Jesus and came back to the Church.

It was during these early and formative stages of my life that my Uncle Jerry came in and played a very important role in my spiritual development. Early on, during my atheist years, Uncle Jerry and I bonded over our love of Michael Crichton's technothrillers such as Sphere, Jurassic Park, and The Terminal Man. I felt him a kindred spirit who loved science and truth as much as I did. He was not an atheist like me, however. After I became a believer, the first thing that I remember my Uncle doing was that he gave me a book by J.I. Packer, Knowing God. I read the book, and it became basic and formative for me in my understanding of who God is and why He should matter to me. Every book that I read was built upon the foundation of Knowing God, and I have my Uncle Jerry to thank for laying that foundation by encouraging me to follow God, and not simply experiences of God. My father was much more experiential and charismatic in his spirituality. He loved to sing worship songs and to travel around to churches providing the special music in the middle of the service. In this respect, I am a near opposite of my father. Whereas my father was highly emotional and open to "movements of the Spirit," I am a skeptic by nature and distrust experience for the most part.

It is because of these differences between my father and I that this book from my Uncle was of such value. I was used to seeing authors like John Bevere and Bob Larson around which emphasized defeating the devil and overcoming demonic forces. What I found in Packer's writings was an emphasis on God Himself - the person of God. The next book, which I still read to this day, is John Stott's book Authentic Christianity, which is a collection of extended quotes from Stott. As before, this book took me to the next level in my commitment to God - yet in a way that did not primarily emphasize experience. I was grateful for the God-centeredness of Packer and Stott. I didn't know it yet, but it was the God of Packer and Stott which I was missing in my Free Methodist theological education I was getting. It was only years later when I found the writings of R.C. Sproul did I once again recognize the great and sovereign God which I had first encountered in the writings of these two books.

Throughout my life, my Uncle has been a spiritual inspiration to me, and I will never forget the special interest which he seemed to take in me during those formative and important years of my life. I only hope that when my nieces and nephews are at the right age, their uncle Adam will be remembered as a blessing and not as a nuisance (history is against me on that one, though!).

More Tree of Life FUN!

2011-08-29T20:05:00.003-05:00

[The Tree of Life comes to DVD and Blu-Ray on October 11th]

Rushdoonsbury Gets Some Attention

2011-08-29T07:42:00.011-05:00

The last week has been either completely embarrassing or very exciting for Theonomists of their various stripes. When has the mainstream media ever even uttered the name R.J. Rushdoony in the past, after all? On the other hand, do Theonomists even want the MSM to talk about their views? You have, however, some very measured and careful thoughts from Ross Douthat, who doesn't appear to see a terrifying threat on the horizon. On the other hand, you have people like Michelle Goldberg who think that Theonomy is some sort of secret cult-like conspiracy that is endemic to the right.

My interest is not in contributing to the political discussion since we here at Bring the Books do not identify ourselves with Theonomy in any sense. The fact is that our Two Kingdoms approach is no political threat to whatever nation we as Christians live in because the assumption is that we are to be in this world, wherever we find ourselves, to plant vineyards, to build houses, and to pray for the King, wherever we find outselves. Theonomists (R1Kers, you might call them) do not teach the terrifying things that Goldberg thinks they do, but their views are indeed a real threat to democracy-loving social libertarians - I don't think that can be denied. The defense that I keep seeing from Theonomists is that this transformation will happen via legitimate democratic political mechanisms and will come about because of mass conversions and not by a seizure of force. However, even if that is exactly what happens, not everyone who lives under this newly envisioned theocracy is going to be happy about it. They would live under it, but not willingly.

The threat that is felt nationwide at the mention of something as creepy-sounding as Dominionism or Theonomy is certainly an over-reaction. However, I would suggest that there is a seed of truth, and it causes one to pause and reflect - do our political ideals as Christians line up with Jesus when he said that His kingdom was a spiritual kingdom that is emphatically NOT "of this world," or are we building a kingdom of this world that even the staunchest secularists can see we are jockeying for control of?

Open Message to Derek Webb: Flea Stole Your Bass Part

2011-08-26T08:29:00.006-05:00

Now Derek, I know you're not the litigious type. But if you were, you could probably receive enough royalties from the sale of the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album that you could get as weird and experimental with your music as you could ever desire. Getting to the point: here is your song "Jena & Jimmy" from your great album Stockholm Syndrome:

You like that bass part? Well I do. And so does Flea, apparently:

All I'm saying is that there is a STRONG similarity between the bass part of "Jena & Jimmy" and the one on "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie." I'm not personally a fan of lawsuits over these sorts of things, and I know you aren't either, Derek. But at the very least you can feel gratified that you came up with this great bass part before Flea did.

[Edit: It should also be pointed out that if you expand the video for the Chili Peppers song to full screen you can see that they took (one might say "borrowed liberally") U2's music video idea from "Where the Streets Have No Name."]

Letter to Christians

2011-08-22T21:02:00.001-05:00

R2K?

2011-08-22T20:21:00.005-05:00

I would like to take a moment and thank those who disagree with the Two Kingdoms view for at least calling it "R2K," which, as I recall from my Seminary days, means Reformed Two Kingdoms. I am thankful they grant that the Two Kingdom view is the Reformed view.

The Simplicity of Amillennialism

2011-08-22T09:32:00.005-05:00

Just a playful jab at Rev. Glaser's latest post. For my own part, I think it would be nice if simplicity was the ultimate test of truth.

Perspectives on the Sabbath

2011-08-20T10:50:00.005-05:00

Chris Donato was on Reformed Forum to talk about his book Perspectives on the Sabbath: Four Views. You can download the episode in podcast form here.

I reviewed Donato's book back in July, but I still have not shared it here at Bring the Books. And so here it is: my review of Perspectives on the Sabbath.

Review: Perspectives on the Sabbath: Four Views
ed. Christopher John Donato
Released: April 1, 2011
Publisher: B&H Academic
For Purchase at Westminster Books
420 Pages

I would venture to guess that most Christians have not thought about the issue of the Sabbath before. Many, like myself, have always assumed that they ought to attend worship on Sundays out of tradition, but maybe haven't considered what it really means, theologically speaking. A large contingent of the church thinks that Sabbath observance is fulfilled if one attends religious services.

Thankfully, if you're ignorant in this area, there is a solution. Chris Donato has edited a new volume devoted to letting the four major views on the Sabbath duke it out. The format is familiar, with the first chapter being devoted to the author defending his view. In the next chapter, each of the remaining three views have an opportunity to weigh in, and then of course, the original author is given a chance to respond to the other three in a few brief pages, wrapping things up. To the editor’s credit, enough space is given (400+ pages total) to deal substantially with each view. As a point of reference, other volumes from the same series are less than half the size of this one.

The four perspectives being shared in this book could be separated into two units: those who say that the Sabbath commandments are still binding, and those who say that the Sabbath commandments are no longer binding. The first half of the book covers the two views arguing for a continuing Sabbath. Skip MacCarty, as I mentioned before, begins by defending the Seventh Day Sabbath view. In Part II, Joseph Pipa defends what he calls (to the chagrin of the other contributors) the Christian Sabbath view. After this, we are introduced to the two views who say that Sabbath Commandments are no longer binding. In Part III Charles Arand spends his time laying out Luther’s view of the Sabbath. Finally in Part IV, Craig Blomberg lays out the Fulfilled Sabbath view.

Skip MacCarty: Seventh Day Sabbath View
MacCarty emphasizes the permanency of the Sabbath as being rooted in the opening chapters of Genesis and argues that it is a persistent observance instituted at the beginning of creation, rooted in the creative act and resting of God after that creation act. For MacCarty, it is significant that the Sabbath is never explicitly overturned, and that there is no explicit command in the NT for the Church to begin worshipping on Sundays.

A large amount of MacCarty's essay is devoted to establishing distinctions between the New and Old Covenant, since an obvious conclusion to draw from the smoother continuity found in MacCarty's view would be to suggest that MacCarty does not see a difference between the Old and New Covenants. MacCarty adeptly demonstrates that one can hold to the persistence of the Sabbath and still clearly distinguish Old and New.

The differences between MacCarty and Pipa's view are really very minimal, relative to the other contributors. However, the discussion over which day the worship ought to take place on was quite exegetically involved, as is appropriate for two views which differ in so few other respects. They are both arguing for the permanency and the persistence of the Sabbath as it is presented in the Ten Commandments. Their entire struggle is over the question of whether the command is to have a day or the (seventh) day for Sabbath rest. In the end, MacCarty ably defended the Seventh Day Adventist perspective on these matters and demonstrated that his is a view which is not to be dismissed out of hand.

Joseph Pipa: Christian Sabbath View
Joseph Pipa’s chapter set forth the view that the Sabbath is a permanent and persistent aspect of the creation. Hermeneutically speaking, the Christian Sabbath view determines what OT laws are still binding by using the threefold Civil/Ceremonial/Moral distinction and by accepting that the moral teachings of the OT are what still persist in the NT era, since the Apostles rescinded the civil/ceremonial aspects of the law in the book of Acts. According to Pipa, the Sabbath is a part of the persistent moral law, as are the other Ten Commandments. (Blomberg implies that this is legalistic/pharisaic on Pipa's part, but I see nothing legalistic about saying that one ought to obey God's revealed will.)

Although the Apostles did move the Sabbath day to Sunday, Pipa argues that since the beginning, the command was always for a day of worship. Thus, when the Apostles began to institute worship on Sundays, Pipa finds no incompatibility with the Sabbath command of the Ten Commandments. As I said, this is the point of contention between Pipa/MacCarty. Pipa holds the Puritan view as expressed in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and quoted the Westminster to buttress the theological underpinnings of his view, but Blomberg, in his response, was put off by Pipa's repeated use of the Westminster Standards, though he mistakenly saw Pipa as depending on them when, in fact, he merely utilized them to articulate his view on Scripture's teaching.

For my own part, after reading the whole book, I came out favoring Pipa's view, though I'm a bit biased since we're both confessionally bound to Westminster. I did notice that near the end of the book, Pipa took a step a bit too far and basically accused Blomberg's view of leading towards Sabbath Day antinomianism (387). Blomberg responded violently to this, of course, calling his comments "inaccurate, unnecessary, offensive, and inappropriately polemical" (408). Blomberg is right, of course, since he does see Scriptural commands for weekly worship, though he doesn't equate Sabbath commands with commands to worship. This conflict was the only area of this volume where one detected even a hint of animus, however.

Charles Arand: Luther's Radical Reading of the Sabbath
Charles Arand’s chapter defending the Lutheran view was, in some ways, the odd one out. While the other contributors chose a more textually oriented and exegetical approach in dealing with their respective views, Arand chose a more historical theological approach. In his chapter, he helpfully discussed the historical situation regarding the Sabbath during Luther’s time. He curiously devotes at least half of his essay discussing Luther’s view of the entire Ten Commandments and then spends the remainder of the time dealing with the Sabbath Commandment in light of that. In a book devoted to Luther’s Sabbath views, such a thing would be welcome, perhaps even necessary; but I got the sense, in this volume, that Arand just ran out of space. In my opinion, there should have been less emphasis on the broader commandments as a whole in Arand’s chapter and more emphasis on NT teachings about the Sabbath, since I sensed that to be an area which needed more fleshing out.

The Lutheran view sees the Ten Commandments as ultimately reducing to one ("You shall have no other Gods"), and sees them as being specifically for the Jews in the form they were presented, although for Luther, a day of rest ought to be observed for devotion to the Word. Curiously (and MacCarty points this out in his response), Luther appears to have, in the name of Christian liberty, repealed the Sabbath, but then, in very strong terms, condemned those who did not participate in it. Whatever one might say about the Lutheran view, I didn't really feel like I got it. Arand's approach got in the way of his view, in my opinion.

Craig Blomberg: The Sabbath as Fulfilled In Christ
Craig Blomberg, finally, presents the “fulfilled Sabbath” view, which argues that Christ has "fulfilled" (read: transformed) the Sabbath and therefore reads the commandments through a filter of sorts, using Christ's New Testament teaching as a guide for what aspects of the OT are still valid in the NT. His hermeneutic says that an Old Testament law is still applicable if it is taught again in the New Testament. He is clear that the Sabbath is valid for Christians today, but that it is a spiritualized Sabbath that does not look at all like Sabbatarianism. The following statement fairly summarizes Blomberg’s take on things, after running the Sabbath through his NT framework:

We obey the Sabbath commandment of the Decalogue as we spiritually rest in Christ, letting Him bear our burdens, trusting for salvation and committing our lives to Him in service, and then remaining faithful in lifelong loyalty to Him rather than committing apostasy (351).

So we see that for Blomberg, the NT application is much more of a spiritualized version of the Sabbath. While Blomberg writes very well and very persuasively, I perceive a great weakness in Blomberg's overall view, and that is a lack of systematic coherence. By eschewing, as he sees it, both Covenant theology and Dispensationalism (though he says he leans more Covenant), he is left with a less systematic approach than the Adventist, Lutheran, and Reformed perspectives. He seems to admit as much in his concluding response to the other three:

My goal, at least, is always to let scriptural exegesis more than presuppositions, 'functional nonnegotiables,' or theological traditions determine my conclusions. And if that leaves me with a disparate conglomeration of beliefs on a variety of topics that don’t easily fit one well-known and existing label or branch of historical theology, then so be it (409).

If you are like me and value historical pedigree and overall systematic approaches to theology, then you may follow me in leaning away from Blomberg's clear and well-stated fulfillment view. One text which Blomberg's view hinges on is Colossians 2:16, which is a very difficult text for Sabbatarians of all stripes. It's texts like these that the reader will have to meditate on and study long after they are done reading this volume.

Conclusion
After reading the whole book, I went back to the editor's introduction, and I want to share one section, because Chris Donato sums up my overall impression quite well:

[T]he Sabbath...serves as a microcosm of much larger questions fundamental to the nature of the worshipping community of Christ itself. Hermeneutical presuppositions and the covenantal (dis)continuity of God’s redemptive plan, among a great many other elements, are at once exposed when discussing this question (3).

It's really the strength of a book like Perspectives on the Sabbath: Four Views that in one succinct volume most of the issues related to the topic have been laid out neatly so that the undecided reader knows what it is he needs to study on his own time in order to grasp the issues that are at stake. At the end of the day, this is a rewarding, scholarly book about hermeneutics in action that will stick with you long after you've physically read it.

New Christian Cliche: "Monopoly on Truth"

2011-08-19T07:43:00.004-05:00

I was reading a blog this morning where the author was broadly lamenting how clumsy the Reformed response was to Rob Bell's book from earlier this year. In the comments section, someone named Rob Auld commented: "Maybe we should be less certain we have the monopoly on truth, then the books wouldn't be a big deal." This is just such an ignorant thing to say that I had to respond. (Aside from the incomprehensibility of being "less certain" about truth.) And let me also quickly insert that this "monopoly on truth" phrase which keeps getting pulled out is becoming such a meme in the Christian world that it may actually surpass "my smokin' hot wife" as most annoying thing out there. So what follows was my response to him. I wrote enough that I thought it was worth sharing here:

Rob, this phrase "monopoly on truth" is a worn out cliche. It's becoming meaningless because it ultimately represents skepticism even about ourselves. Everyone believes they have a monopoly on truth, or else they don't really believe what they're saying. Yes, Rob, even you in your above quote. Just for effect, let me throw in a little Chesterton:

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.

And let me suggest that this same intellectual helplessness is endemic in modern Protestant Christianity today, as well. We've made a virtue out of being able to sentimentally say, "I don't really know, and that make me humble." But we're too skeptical to know whether humility is really virtuous. Either own your beliefs, Rob, or don't. But if you don't think it's true, then don't waste someone's time by saying it out loud.

VanDrunen on the Continuing Applicability of the Mosaic Civil Code

2011-08-18T18:47:00.008-05:00

In his magnificent volume Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, David VanDrunen spends the fifth chapter of his book examining the view of men during the time of high orthodoxy like Turretin and Rutherford regarding the natural law and its relationship to the Mosaic civil law. One argument that VanDrunen spends a great deal of time substantiating is that the orthodox Reformed theologians saw the civil law as remaining in effect insofar as it conformed to the Natural Law. At one point, Turretin even says that (in VanDrunen's words) "equity is the mind of the law as well as the aim, rule, and end of all law." Then, in Turretin's words, "the law of nature (the fountain of all other laws, because it is the most equitable) is also the most majestic" (Institutes 2.137-138). I quote these words with an eye on our contemporary environment where, especially those who have been influenced by Van Til (and I count myself among them, to a degree) by and large tend to reject Natural Law.

In VanDrunen's conclusion in this section, he discusses how we ought to understand the reference to equity in WCF 19.4, which reads as follows:

To them also, as a body politic, He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging under any now, further than the general equity thereof may require.

Here is the conclusion VanDrunen reaches:

In light of this evidence, I suggest that the most plausible reading of WCF 19.4 [with regard to its reference to equity] concurs with the general sentiments of the Reformed orthodox writers being studied in this chapter. The civil or judicial law of Moses has been abrogated in the coming of Christ, yet has continuing applicability insofar as it reflects the natural law. For Reformed orthodoxy, as for the Reformation and medieval traditions of the past, civil magistrates ought not to impose the Mosaic civil law as such upon contemporary societies. Yet at times they will implement Mosaic civil laws, not because they are Mosaic laws, but because they are particular applications of the natural law still appropriate under present circumstances. (p. 170-171)

Living as an Ex-Suicide

2011-08-16T20:34:00.005-05:00

Walker Percy, writing in 1980, penned the following words:

The fact is that, by virtue of its peculiar relationship to the world, to others, and to its own organism, the autonomous self in a modern technological society is possessed. It is possessed by the spirit of the erotic and the secret love of violence. The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages. As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

Some very prescient thoughts from Walker Percy in his book Lost in the Cosmos. A Roman Catholic writer, Percy not only wrote novels, but he also wrote this book - billed as a sort of farcical self-help book where he attempts to force his readers to consider themselves and their own lostness for just one moment. I love this book. I share one more paragraph which is not related, but which I have found very insightful, nevertheless.

As a minor introductory note, I have noticed that for Percy, entertaining the thought of suicide is quite important. In The Moviegoer, it is only in realizing the possibility of suicide that Kate is set free from her bondage. His book The Second Coming opens with a man who realizes how farcical the world is and hence decides to kill himself only to find liberation in the notion that suicide is always there, hovering in the background. In the paragraph (also from Lost in the Cosmos), when Percy uses the term "ex-suicide," he means someone who, like Kate, stepped to the abyss, saw the possibility, and decided life was worth living after all. Enough introduction; here is what Percy says:

The consequences of entertainable suicide? Lying on the beach, you are free for the first time in your life to pick up a coquina and look at it. You are even free to go home and, like the man from Chicago, dance with your wife. The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn’t have to.

As one more rejoinder, lets consider the close proximity of what Percy says here and what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 6 about being dead to sin and now being alive to Christ.

One Less Quiver in the Preacher's Arrow

2011-08-16T07:00:00.005-05:00

In his commentary on the Gospel of Mark from the NIGTC series, R.T. France (on pg 430), speaking about the composition of the crowd at the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem in Mark 11, points out that the crowd which praised Jesus, singing "Hosanna" is not the same crowd who would later crucify him. He bases this on the fact that the processional following Jesus to Jerusalem began in Jericho. The Greek phrase, putting their identities beyond doubt, according to France, is proagontes kai oi akolouthountes - the ones going before and the ones following. This is the same pilgrim group that has been traveling with Jesus throughout Act Two of Mark's Gospel.

There is no warrant here for the preacher's favorite comment on the fickleness of a crowd which could shout 'Hosanna' one day and 'Crucify him' a few days later. They are not the same crowd. The Galilean pilgrims shouted 'Hosanna' as they approached the city; the Jerusalem crowd shouted, 'Crucify him'.

A Prooftext for the Threefold Division?

2011-08-15T22:25:00.004-05:00

I have read and loved Philip Ross' book From the Finger of God: The Biblical and Theological Basis for the Threefold Division of the Law. I am now reading it through for the second time more slowly because I am helping teach a class at our church on the Ten Commandments and am finding Ross' work to be extremely helpful. I am drastically over-preparing for the class and almost certainly my leftovers and notes will become posts here at BTB in the future.

What was of interest to me was that Ross includes in the book a prooftext which Aquinas was fond of using to show that the threefold division of the law into moral, civil, and ceremonial may be more than just a helpful convention. He points to Deuteronomy 6:1:

These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess.

Ross examines the three words for "decrees," "commands" and "laws" and comes to this conclusion:

...[T]he individual Hebrew words for law do not divide the law into cast-iron categories. Even so, the [sic] Deuteronomy's use of the words sometimes makes a distinction between the Decalogue and the rest of the Mosaic code. That distinction does not force the practical-theological conclusion that the Decalogue 'doth for ever bind all'. It does, however, further challenge the view that the Old Testament law was written, and always viewed, as an indivisible whole.

Lightning Storm + Rich Mullins

2011-08-15T21:59:00.002-05:00

About a week ago a huge lightningstorm passed southeast of our house. It was a late night, and I decided to step out side to videotape the lightning. Some of you may find something pleasing about this video. I've set it to the tune of Rich Mullins' song "Calling Out Your Name" which is fitting for two reasons: (a) he makes reference to feeling "the thunder in the sky/I see the sky about to rain" which fits the video, and (b) he's from Kansas, like me, and so I always feel like he's singing about my home. I'm self-centered like that.

Three Movies That Changed My Life (Part 3)

2011-08-14T22:11:00.008-05:00

1. The Thin Red Line

There is no other movie out there that I have triple-dipped for before except this one. I used to own it on VHS, and I wore out my copy til it became nigh unwatchable. Then I bought it on DVD and watched it too many times to count, although it bore nary a scratch because it was beloved to me. Finally, for my birthday my wife got me the Criterion Edition Blu-Ray of it (probably the greatest looking film ever seen on Blu-Ray, it is reference quality and sets the standard for all film transfers, as far as I'm concerened), and I watch it constantly. In the last six months I've owned it, I've probably watched it five or six times. I do not tire of it. I have nearly memorized every scene and every line of this movie. I have owned both discs of the soundtrack for the film and listened to them obsessively. I have purchased and read the book by James Jones which the movie was based on. I cannot say the same of any other movie. Watching it becomes a ritual for me, where I turn out the lights, pull my chair up five feet from the TV, and just get lost in the greatest film of all time. It's been my favorite since I first saw it in 1998.

I was a junior in high school. I bought an old used copy on VHS from Blockbuster. I had never seen it, but for $3 I could ignore the fact that the case for the movie was long gone. I took it home, watched it, and was mystified. I thought this was supposed to be a war movie, but instead I found an abstract exploration of sin, death, violence, and God. Holy cow, so I watched it again. The second time, I tuned the world out and became lost in the glory. A third time. It was all coming together; I was tasting something beautiful in the universe. Progressively as I've watched this film I have always gleaned something new. It's a masterpiece. A masterpiece. I'm gushing.

As a high school junior, I was way too shut up in my little town with my little sophomoric worries. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted friends. I wanted a better truck. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to go to college and become somebody - anybody. I knew there was a world out there, but it felt so far away. All I felt when I looked around me was concrete, wheat fields, closed up storefronts - reminders of a bygone time that was good and once rang of prosperity and success. This was the town I came from, and I'll never forget it because it provided the context for my delight in The Thin Red Line.

Here was a film which did not pass by on the screen, but screamed at me that there was a larger reality and that I should not identify it with myself. I became inflamed with a desire to enjoy the world, to not pass up the delights of flowers, of clouds, of the touch of a girl's hand. After watching The Thin Red Line, I knew that these things were real in more than just a "my life is a TV show" sense. I saw the universe, I saw what I had been missing, and I resolved that whether I died today or tomorrow or 50 years from now, it could not be denied that I lived.

The film injected a poetry into everyday life which I still enjoy. I will often go on a walk and remind myself to savor this moment as though it were my last. Although I have since heard this sentiment echoed by Jonathan Edwards, C.S. Lewis, and John Piper, I learned it from all of these men in the context of a post-Thin-Red-Line world. A world after I had seen this film. It became my reference point for finding the beauty in the ordinary and in the extraordinary. The film addresses specific theological matters without ever really speaking of God. The strength of what the film does is, it denies the possibility of comprehending the world apart from God, much like director Terrence Malick would later do with his potential (I haven't decided yet and won't for a decade) magnum opus The Tree of Life.

In the end, it doesn't matter if I convince you. I probably won't. Either you're one of those people who hate this movie, or you agree with me that it's a filmmaking masterpiece. Maybe you're like Gene Siskel and think it's "the greatest contemporary war film I've ever seen." In that case, I'm with you, providing you'll remove the "contemporary war" qualifier. Or maybe you're like a group of my friends I invited over to watch it with the other evening who seemed almost completely mystified by it. In that case, you still need to see it a second or third time.

In the end, I really don't care. The film made it's mark on me, and it's still making its mark on me. Yes, it really is the greatest film ever made. I'll get in a fist-fight defending that claim.

Best dialogue from The Thin Red Line:

Witt: I remember my mother when she was dyin', looked all shrunk up and gray. I asked her if she was afraid. She just shook her head. I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. I couldn't find nothin' beautiful or uplifting about her goin' back to God. I heard of people talk about immortality, but I ain't seen it. I wondered how it'd be like when I died, what it'd be like to know this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she did, with the same... calm. 'Cause that's where it's hidden - the immortality I hadn't seen.

Welsh: In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.

Storm: I look at that boy dyin', I don't feel nothin'. I don't care about nothin' anymore.
Welsh: Sounds like bliss.

Witt: We were a family. How'd it break up and come apart, so that now we're turned against each other? Each standing in the other's light. How'd we lose that good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered it, careless. What's keepin' us from reaching out, touching the glory?

Train: Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness, light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.

Witt: Do you ever feel lonely?
Welsh: Only around people.

Welsh: There's only one thing a man can do - find something that's his, and make an island for himself. If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack; a glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours.

Bell: Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free.

Train: What is this great evil? How did it steal into the world? From what seed, what root did it spring? Who's doing this? Who's killing us? Robbing us of light and life. Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known.

Bell: Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you. If I go first, I'll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters. Be with me now.

Witt: War don't ennoble men. It turns them into dogs... poisons the soul.

Pushing Yourself to the Next Level

2011-08-14T21:35:00.004-05:00

I want to do a plug for one of my favorite blogs on the net. It's called The Art of Manliness, and if you don't read this blog, then you are missing out. They inspired me to do the following things over the last few months:

Make homemade ice cream with my kids.
Become a hat man. I bought a felt and straw fedora because of their blog.
Start dressing snappier. I threw away a dozen t-shirts and made the move to button shirts with ties and vests, even when I'm not going out. It has really increased my everyday confidence and has encouraged my productivity here at BTB.
Start shaving with cold water. Their arguments in favor of it are sound.
Learn how to talk to my barber.

This may be as close to an inspirational post as I'll ever share because normally that sort of stuff is sappy, sentimental, and very me-focused. However, this post from AOM has some very helpful advice, even for would-be theologians or pastors. What is it that makes us plateau and keeps us from getting better?

Turretin: Natural Law is from God

2011-08-13T16:35:00.003-05:00

"[T]here is a natural law, not arising from a voluntary contract of law of society, but from a divine obligation being impressed by God upon the conscience of man in his very creation, on which the difference between right and wrong is founded and which contains the practical principles of immovable truth (such as: 'God should be worshipped,' 'parents honored,' 'we should live virtuousy,' 'injure no one,' 'do to others what we would wish them to do to us' and the like). Also that so many remains and evidences of the law are still left in our nature (although it has been in different ways corrupted and obscured by sin) that there is no mortal who cannot feel its force either more or less."

-Turretin's Institutes 2.3

The Professional Book Review: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

2011-08-13T09:37:00.009-05:00

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy is a book that I have been aware of for years, ever since learning that Terrence Malick at one time wanted to adapt the book to film. Percy was a Catholic (why do Catholics get all the good modern fiction writers?), and I have to agree with my friend the Christian Curmudgeon: I really hope Percy is one of those Catholics I will meet in Heaven someday.

Having spent the last week reading it, I feel in many respects reproved by the book and simultaneously broken open by it. This is a book I wish I had written. In a lot of ways it represents a conglomeration of my own fears on the modern malaise which I see in myself and in others. Putting it all into words is difficult because in so doing, none of the book or its ideas are done proper justice; nevertheless, I shall try.

The book is, at its core, written in the first person as a letter to a friend recounting approximately a week in the life of one man. This narrative becomes an exploration of mankind's complete disconnectedness with his world, with other people, at least with regard to anything beyond surface-level existence. There is a numbness to mankind which is exemplified in the person of Percy's protagonist, Binx Bolling. Binx goes through life living externally (see my previous review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes - there is in my mind a correlation between the externalized, soulless behavior of the apes and the shallow interior life of Binx). He thinks alot but never draws the connection between the ontological reality of the things he sees and the objects that appear before his eyes. He's not a genius, but he likes to look around and observe. He enjoys making money, going to movies by himself, and spending lots of time with women. He is an atheist and doesn't understand the idea of God:

My unbelief was invincible from the beginning. I could never make head or tail of God. The proofs of God’s existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. If God himself had appeared to me, it would have changed nothing. In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head. My father’s family think that the world makes sense without God and that anyone but an idiot knows what the good life is and anyone but a scoundrel can lead it. I don’t know what either of them are talking about.

Clearly, Binx is aware of his problem, and he sees it all around him - a humanity too numb and disconnected to really care about anything.

They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human...

It is difficult to express just how clearly and tangibly I also see what Binx is talking about. This malaise almost seems to be a problem unique to our own time, where all of life is seen through screens and images. I have often driven down the highway with my sunglasses on and had it occur to me, "This is just like Steve McQueen or Tom Cruise." We interpret our lives through images and even the imagining of images. Even our thoughts come in snippets - which is why I quit Facebook. I was tired of constantly thinking up my next sentence to share on the social network.

At one point he discusses the fact that it is only pain and death which seem to shake us from our sleep. He is walking with Kate one night and has the following conversation:

Now in the shadow of the camphor tree she stops suddenly, takes my arm in both hands. “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck—people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.”

Binx is interested in things - even controversial subjects like politics, but he is unwilling to insert himself into the subject or to take a stand on anything.

Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other.

Bolling himself settles for the little pleasures in life that he can find, and seems content to merely reckon himself a spectator. In one of my favorite sections, we see this sentiment expressed and also get a flavor for Percy's beautiful prose style:

Yet loves revives as we spin homewards along the coast through the early evening. Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad, Sharon’s beauty and my aunt’s bravery, and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson’s and the motels and the children’s carnival. We pull into a bay and have a drink under the stars. It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.

Binx lives to eat, drink, and be merry. However, he can talk about religions of all kinds with everyone. By all accounts he appears to be a deep thinker. He is not a shallow person, but he is stuck thinking in superficial categories and looking at people almost as if they are not there.

The last chapter of the book may be my favorite chapter of any book ever. It begins with Binx's aunt excoriating him because she has realized how untrustworthy, dishonorable, and disconnected from life he really is. I offer an extended quote from her because its such a beautiful cultural analysis:

Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions. No orgies, no blood running in the street, no babies thrown off cliffs. No, we’re sentimental people and we horrify easily. True, our moral fiber is rotten. Our national character stinks to high heaven. But we are kinder than ever. No prostitute ever responded with a quicker spasm of sentiment when our hearts are touched. Nor is there anything new about thievery, lewdness, lying, adultery. What is new is that in our time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be congratulated and are congratulated by the great public, if their confession is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and authentic note of sincerity. Oh, we are sincere. I do not deny it. I don’t know anybody nowadays who is not sincere. Didi Lovell is the most sincere person I know: every time she crawls in bed with somebody else, she does so with the utmost sincerity. We are the most sincere Laodiceans who ever got flushed down the sinkhole of history. No, my young friend, I am not ashamed to use the word class. They say out there we think we’re better. You’re damn right we’re better. And don’t think they don’t know it—

Percy repeatedly quashes modern sentimentality. More than once, this subject comes up. What is it that Binx notices about the Presbyterians? They're nice. They're always so nice; they're such nice people. That's what he remembers about them. One gets the sense that Percy does not really think this is what one should be remembered for. As I mentioned before, Binx is aware of these existential problems, but feels in a sense helplessness - despair - at his situation. In his dreamier moments, he thinks of a possibility of what might rescue humanity - maybe shake them loose so that they can really find themselves.

Is it possible that—For a long time I have secretly hoped for the end of the world and believed with Kate and my aunt and Sam Yerger and many other people that only after the end could the few who survive creep out of their holes and discover themselves to be themselves and live as merrily as children among the viny ruins. Is it possible that—it is not too late?

He doesn't really learn his lesson of course, or discover a path out of his predicament.

“What do you plan to do?” I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons.

It becomes increasingly clear that Binx is still a victim of a dark despair from which he only believes that violence will release humanity. [Warning: Some profanity in the next paragraph]

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde When I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

In the last paragraph of the book, Binx sits in a church parking lot waiting for his fiancee Kate to emerge from religious services. As he's waiting he sees a man getting out of his car and heading into the church.

I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.

I've never connected so much with a book before. Honestly, I am cut from the same cloth as Binx Bolling. I feel the shallowness all around me - I swim in it and breathe it in and out all day long. I am just as lost in the numb haze as Binx Bolling.

We come to that overarching metaphysical question which weighs upon Binx's readers - is there escape? Is it possible that the bomb has dropped? Is it possible that we can be shaken out of our malaise and into the real human existence we were always meant for? At first I was tempted to answer that no, the bomb hasn't fallen and this malaise is just an affliction of our sinfulness. The more I think about it, though, the more I believe that the bomb did drop two thousand years ago and all of us simply need to crawl out of our holes by the grace of God and start seeing ourselves as ourselves and "living merrily as children."

Favorite One-Liners from The Moviegoer:

"My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice."

"This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground."

"As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquillized in their despair."

[You can get an old used copy of the book delivered to your door from Amazon for $4.00 total, or delivered to your Kindle for $4.99]

Three Movies That Changed My Life (Part 2)

2011-08-13T05:00:00.000-05:00

2. Ben-Hur
It is an epic classic and perhaps a bit too obvious of a choice for anybody's list of great films, but this film does have a special place in my heart. When I was 17 years old, Christ found me out and I became a follower of Jesus. My life was totally changed, and I saw everything differently. I'll never forget the true excitement of celebrating my first Christmas after abandoning atheism and finding the true Creator. There's just nothing replacing that period of my life.

A few months into my new life, I decided to watch Ben-Hur. I knew nothing about it. Nothing. I only knew that it had a chariot race, and that many regarded it as one of the greatest films of all time. As I watched, I became slack-jawed as I realized that this beautiful film epic was actually a movie about Jesus. I really couldn't believe it.

As I watched this story of revenge unfold before me, I was thrilled by its epic quality, blown away by Charleton Heston's voice, and moved by the tale I was seeing. The scene where Ben-Hur falls to the ground because the Romans will not give him a drink, you feel true despair and empathetic thirst. But when Jesus comes and he drinks deeply from Christ's cup you not only feel the symbolism, you sense that Jesus is the only one in this crazy, cruel story who really brings any hope. I still shake tearfully when I watch that scene. But Christ seems so peripheral to the story that you almost wonder if the subtitle "A tale of the Christ" is really appropriate. But of course you'd be wrong.

You really feel that if only Judah Ben-Hur could have his revenge, everything really would be solved. And those around Ben-Hur feel it too. At one point, Ester says to Judah, "It was Judah Ben-Hur I loved. What has become of him? You seem to be now the very thing you set out to destroy, giving evil for evil! Hatred is turning you to stone. It is as though you had become Messala!"

In this sense this film really is the anti-Gladiator. Whereas revenge satisfies Maximus (not for long, of course), Judah is a bit too thoughtful to settle for spilling his enemy's blood. He tries it at first, to be sure, but it is an empty and shallow victory. Once revenge is taken and you think that a resolution has been found, the movie keeps going. We soon see that Ben-Hur has no peace. In one of my favorite lines from any movie, Judah Ben-Hur takes a drink from a river and says, "When the Romans were marching me to the galleys, thirst had almost killed me. A man gave me water to drink, and I went on living. I should have done better if I'd poured it into the sand...I'm thirsty still."

The fact that Ben-Hur only finds peace by encountering the crucified Lord felt like the most truthful conclusion of any movie I've ever seen. Many times we get a taste of the truth, but it felt like Ben-Hur gave us the whole truth. In one sense, what more could you ask for from any movie?

The movie is filled with beautiful lines. During Christ's crucifixion Balthasar says, "I have lived too long." At one point, Ben-Hur's leprous mother and sister are leaving their cave and Miriam says, "I'm afraid," to which Esther replies, "No cause. The world is more than we know." In another line which still brings tears to my eyes, Christ is passing Ben-Hur carrying the cross to which Ben-Hur says, "I know this man!" I don't know why that line gets me, but it does every time.

Ultimately, this film made a tremendous impression on me at a very important time in my life, just like the other two movies on this list. I was encouraged in my discipleship by it, I was convinced that only Jesus brought real and lasting peace to the wounded heart, and most importantly, I glorified Jesus as I watched it and whenever I remember it. I always appreciated that they never showed Jesus face as well, although it's hard to deny that their Jesus looks an awful lot like a western european non-Jew.

In the end, finding the movies that will make the most impact on us are a crap-shoot. You don't really know until a century passes what has and hasn't affected the way you think and how you process the things you encounter in life. A friend asked me if The Tree of Life was my new favorite movie and all I could say was, "I'll tell you in ten years."

Coming tomorrow: My favorite movie of all time and the one film that has had the greatest impact on my life.

Hilarious Blog Comment

2011-08-12T21:34:00.003-05:00

It's never funny to over-explain things, but I was reading this catholic entertainment blog about the newer Ben Hur TV Miniseries. I got the information that I needed, but found this very unintentionally funny comment at the bottom of the page. Now remember, this is basically a Catholic Nun that this guys is making his request to. You may have to click the picture to see the whole thing. I think you'll agree, this dog is barking up the wrong tree.

Life Used to be Nearly Perfect

2011-08-12T07:42:00.003-05:00

As should be evident from my last post, I've been in a nostalgic mood lately. I just had to share this video from 1991 (I was 9 years old) which some of you may get a kick out of. Notice that whereas today we have rioting, looting, and murdering in the streets, life used to be so much better. Just look at this video where the biggest problem facing parents is children who needed therapy for having become "Ninten-pendent." I only wish my writing was good enough to get across the tongue-in-cheeky-ness of the last two sentences.

Three Movies That Changed My Life (Part 1)

2011-08-12T05:00:00.001-05:00

Three Movies That Changed My Life

I know it sounds like a bold claim - the kind of claim somebody only makes about something they're trying to sell and they know you don't want. But in the case of the three movies that we will discuss over the next few days, it's all true. You see, I watched them as a teenager, and frankly they changed the way that I saw the world and well, I still love them. What I want to do is discuss them, talk about what made them so wonderful, and maybe address what it was about the films that made such an impression on me.

3. Blade Runner
I was 15 years old, shopping in the "city" away from my small town where I grew up. While going through the video store I saw Blade Runner on VHS and bought it on a whim. (Seriously, what were they doing selling an R-rated movie to a 15 year old!?) $25 was a sick price to pay, and I have no idea why I bought it, but I did. All my friends were annoyed that there was a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen - they'd never seen a movie with that before. I tried telling them that we were seeing more of the film, but they didn't care - they wanted the picture to fill the screen.

What struck me most deeply about Blade Runner was the fantastically dirty and "used" feeling that Ridley Scott's future of 2019 had. For me, the film was all about atmosphere. I still love the shot of the futuristic chinatown with the flying cars, and I could watch the opening scene with the landscape of LA, the fire rising from the refineries, and the flaming eye over and over again. I was captivated by the idea that a robot could possibly be a person and for a short while I obsessed over finding a way to "know" beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was not a robot. I had inadvertently picked the director's cut of the movie and so had no idea that there was ever a "happy ending" to this movie. When I finally saw the happy ending (with the atrocious voice-over delivered maliciously by an unenthusiastic Harrison Ford) I was so glad that I hadn't seen the theatrical version first. If I had, I'd probably never have fallen in love with the dank, wet, neon landscape of noire Los Angeles, 2019.

After seeing the film, I purchased the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and read it through (twice, I think). I played the PC game through at least three times. It barely ran on my Hewlett Packard 133MHz Pentium. I bought the soundtrack at a Premium and became infatuated with the electronic music of Vangelis. His music transported me to neon cityscapes of unimaginable beauty. Never mind that they weren't real - as I sat in my basement bedroom in my boring small town, I traveled to amazing places because of Vangelis.

A few years later I got a DVD player and along with it my first DVD copy of Blade Runner. Finally, when I made the move to HD, Blade Runner: The Final Cut was the first movie I purchased on Blu-Ray. All in all, it's hard to imagine what kind of a person I would be if I hadn't seen Blade Runner. I know it's an outrageous claim, but it is a fact that my imagination has been greatly stimulated and inspired by this film. On top of all that, and most importantly, it brought me the earliest sparks of philosophical self-reflection which eventually drove me to Christ. Until I pondered my own existence because of the existential questions that I struggled over after seeing this movie, I was a fairly shallow (though I remained consistently self-absorbed) young man. It helped make me the man I am today.

A few years ago I found out that Harrison Ford hated making this movie - that he was miserable during the whole shoot and that he would never work with Ridley Scott again after his experience. I found it so unbelievable that I still refuse to accept it as truth. Frankly, how could anyone be miserable, having been in the coolest, awesomest, deepest, most imaginative movie ever made!?

So that's the third most influential movie in my life. Tomorrow, we'll talk about number two.

Generation of Barbarians?

2011-08-10T22:28:00.007-05:00

Robert Bork once famously said that the next invading barbarian army would be populated by our own children. Such a notion really doesn't seem so outlandish in the light of the increased riots perpetuated by the young, bored, immature generation of monsters that occupy large swaths of society (and evidently, especially English society) all over the world.

I don't mean to be alarmist, but it sort of appears that the barbarian invasion of England has begun, and my guess is that this generation of bored, violent, impulsive youngsters is not going away any time soon. I want to highly recommend this article from the UK Daily Mail by Max Hastings. You may not agree with everything in the article, but there is no question that Hastings has his finger on something here. The truth is, if I hadn't read this article this evening, I probably would have typed out something similar at a furious pace.

While you're at it, it wouldn't hurt to read this pessimistic little article from the Christian Research Journal from a few years ago.

I just want to make one observation as well, from a Natural Law perspective. Reading this article from Max Hastings causes me to reflect that all men - secular or religious - know that what is happening the world over is wrong. They can see that children have been raised to think of themselves as impulsive animals and responsible to no one, and now the price is being paid by society.

[An additional article that I would recommend is by Mike Ovey. Another one by Scott Stinson is quite unsettling, as well.]

The Unprofessional Book Review: Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson

2011-08-10T13:39:00.009-05:00

Erik Larson's books are great. I've read his Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts and they're all wonderful historical narratives. Although Isaac's Storm is not the greatest thing he's ever written, it is a tremendously moving and at times horrifying tale about the most destructive hurricane to ever strike the United States. The tale takes place in Galveston, Texas in 1900 and follows Isaac Monroe - a meteorologist for the newly budded National Weather Service as he comes to grips with the barometer readings and all that scientific stuff. Once he realizes he is dealing with a full-on hurricane, it is too late for the residents of Galveston. In the end, nearly 8,000 people were killed by this hurricane, making New Orleans and 9/11 combined look like child's play. It was (and still is) the deadliest storm in the history of the United States.

Isaac himself lost his wife and baby to the storm and it is gut-wrenching to follow him as he seeks to find her body, confirming for sure that she is actually dead. Isaac was changed forever by this storm and devoted the rest of his life to the study of hurricanes. It was in this respect that I was most affected by what I read as I saw Isaac move from being a scientist to being a man, drawn into the painful reality that weather is not merely something to be studied - it is to be respected.

I think that we in the Church - and especially those in places of leadership - have something profound to learn from this aspect of Isaac's experience.

I have been planning all week to speak to our church's high schoolers about the subject of Christology. Specifically I've been preparing to talk about Jesus' being one person with two natures and about the heresies of the past who have denied or confused these truths. I am convinced these are important things to discuss, and I feel deeply that if all the Gospel hangs on the reality of who Jesus really is, then we will recognize and live in the reality that Christology is not a merely academic pursuit. In truth, I composed the lesson like a scientist preparing to talk about amino acids and DNA. In this context, listen to this moving passage which I think forms the heart of Larson's narrative:

There were dreams. Isaac fell asleep easily each night and dreamed of happy times, only to wake to gloom and grief. He dreamed that he had saved her. He dreamed of the lost baby...During the week he worked on his official report on the storm. Psychically, it was a difficult task. His wife was still missing. The air stank of rotting flesh and burned hair. Always in the past he had been able to separate himself from the meteorological events he described...He was the observer looking upon these phenomena through glass. But this storm had dragged him to its heart and changed his life forever.

Carl Trueman is right - boring preachers should get out of the ministry. But maybe this is why we have so many boring preachers - and why I ought to be terrified of being one of them. If Christ is a hurricane, then the reason why we write and preach so disconnectedly is that we've never been ravaged by him. We've never been taken to the eye and watched the light waves transform as He passes over us. We have never lost family or life or home to the hurricane because it has never been asked of us and we have never offered them up. Many of us have watched through a glass from afar, and I am guilty, myself of often coming to God as a spectator and not a participant. The irony is that I am always teaching the youth of our church that theology is not a scientific or mathematic enterprise where we approach God much as a coroner about to do an autopsy, dispassionately listing off observations into his tape recorder. I frequently warn that theology for its own sake is a devil's doctrine - we must do it, not because we're in need of facts, but because we need God!

I'm teaching the youth tonight, and I'm praying that I will remember the hurricane while I speak to them.

[You can get Isaac's Storm from Amazon for just over $4 used, delivered to your door. Not bad.]

Bishop Mark Driscoll

2011-08-09T13:00:00.004-05:00

It was announced yesterday that Mars Hill Church in Seattle will no longer have campuses. They will now call them "churches." You know what this means now, of course - Say hello to Bishop Mark Driscoll!

In all seriousness, it makes no sense to me for churches who follow a congregational model to adopt what is, in essence, an episcopal form of church government - minus the pageantry. Hopefully the picture isn't taken as being too inflamatory. All in good fun, I say! Go ahead and put up a picture of Ligon Duncan in a J. Crew polo with the collars turned up; won't bother me in the least!

Isaac Asimov - Expert Hermeneutist

2011-08-09T10:29:00.003-05:00

"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." -Isaac Asimov

What Asimov is really saying is that the Bible, read the way which he defines as proper, is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Ooh wait, I have an idea. We can apply these literary methods consistently, I believe: (*ahem*)

"Isaac Asimov's novels, properly read, are the most potent force for Ludditism ever conceived." -Adam Parker

If you read them "properly," of course. That's the key.

Planet of the Apes: Does Ape + Intelligence = Person?

2011-08-09T00:15:00.003-05:00

This is not a movie review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I'll skip past all of that typical review stuff where I recount the plot of the story, because the trailer [above] really does a pretty good job of outlining the story. I will only say that a few months ago when I saw the trailer I seriously thought this would be the worst movie of the whole summer. In my arrogant way, I thought I knew a stink bomb when I saw it; but I was wrong. Far from it, Planet of the Apes is a great, great, great movie. Not Tree of Life great, but maybe The Dark Knight great. Go see it. It's probably my favorite thing that's happened all summer - and that includes the conclusion of Harry Potter.

What I want to point out is not what this movie says about humans or monkeys, but what people will think this movie says about personhood. As you watch this movie, you relate to the main Chimpanzee, Caesar. You watch him grow, you relate to him, you empathize with him; I even shed a tear when he spoke his first word. (A moment not to be lost, I heard exclamations from people all over the theatre in the moment after it happened.) You sense the personhood coming through in the movie, because the CG and motion capture and just the technology in general is so advanced. In the end, I believe that Caesar, for all intents and purposes would be judged by your average viewer to most certainly qualify as a person. Even I, sitting there, was thinking, "That ape is a person!"

And here's where the important part comes in. What does this say about our conception of what a person is? In the film, the only thing that happens to the apes is that they become more intelligent - super intelligent. That's it, and suddenly they become persons. And so that's where the conversation needs to take place, I think. Just as in secularism, the solution is simply education and knowledge. If only those two things could occur, the secularist thinks, then the problems of the world and the ills which beset humanity could be cured. (Read G.K. Chesterton if you want to see this vision of secular salvation lampooned.) Many will come away from this movie reflecting on the notion of personhood and personality and the mistaken impression they will come away with is the idea that all it takes is intelligence and any animal can rise to the level of personhood.

I remember a few years ago hearing the story of Lucy Temerlin. Lucy grew up in a human home and was raised like any human child with one exception - she wasn't human, she was an ape. She grew to cook for herself, speak sign language, befriend her owners - she even grew to only be sexually attracted to humans. Her story reminded me a great deal of Caesar's storyline in the film - in fact, I kept thinking of Lucy almost the entire time I was watching Apes. Anyway, Lucy's story was tragic and saddening. As she grew, it became apparent that she was too strong to live with the humans, but she hadn't the slightest idea how to relate with other apes - in fact, they terrified her. She thought they were some kind of monsters. She grew to live in this intermediate state where she had the semblance of human emotions and pathos, she appeared to be a person, and yet self-reflection always seemed to be just a step beyond her. Eventually, Lucy was sent to an animal reserve where she never really belonged. Her hair fell out, she became malnourished, she didn't know how to care for herself or hunt for food. Years later, Lucy was found dead in the ape reserve.

[If you want to know more, Act Two of episode 401 of This American Life deals with the tale more in depth]

After I first heard this story, it occurred to me immediately that this was a creature who was taught to go through the externals of personhood. Shake hands. Make tea. Don't poop in the living room. Hug your owner. Communicate what you're thinking. Wear people clothes.

All of these things are wholly remarkable, if for no other reason than the fact that these behaviors are all unheard of to most of us. We hear these things and we think, "Well of course they're persons! They do all the things that we do!" Such a response shows what a shallow notion of personhood we really have. What an externalistic way of defining personhood! What is it - what is the one ingredient that Lucy was missing? Why did she always seem to be one step from finding the glory and being at peace? It's the soul. It's the one component that modern man desires to discard from the equation because even if he does like to think that man has one, he also wants to think that animals have them too. Christians often buy into this line of thinking as well. Just do a Google search for "Do animals have" and see how Google completes your entry.

In the end, even Christians are all too quick to think that if an animal shows affection or emotion or shows itself to be extremely intelligent, then it must be some sort or person. Or maybe, just maybe, if my terrier cuddles with me while I watch Mike & Molly, then nobody can tell me that my dog doesn't have a soul. Christians seem reticent to offer a direct answer to this. And maybe this is very unpastoral of me, but it's time we cease tiptoeing around animal lovers' feelings on this subject, and say point blank: your animal doesn't have a soul. It may be special, and it may be cuddly, and it may even have emotions. But just like Lucy, and just like Caesar, they will never be a "living soul" like man is, created uniquely by God Himself and endowed with God's image, no matter how intelligent any animal becomes - terrier or ape - they will always be bound to external behaviors which do not proceed from a living soul.

If there is one thing which I think Planet of the Apes will do, it is provoke debates and questions about personhood. But as Christians, lets be careful to realize that the movie teaches us nothing about men or apes - it tells us everything about what we think of men and apes.

Free Don Whitney Book for Kindle

2011-08-08T13:47:00.002-05:00

Don Whitney's book Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health is free today for Amazon Kindle. From the publisher's description of the book:

Christians today are busier than ever before, doing the "spiritual" work they feel called to out of devotion for God. But are these earnest followers of Christ actually living their faith in a manner that is pleasing to Christ? Whitney (Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life; How Can I Be Sure I'm a Christian?) effectively challenges this "busy hands, empty heart" epidemic. Whitney poses intensely introspective questions to aid Christians as they gauge their own level of spiritual health. Do they have a driving thirst for God, as well as behavior dictated by God's holy standards? How loving to others and sensitive to the Holy Spirit are they? Do they experience genuine grief over personal sin and a willingness to forgive repeat offenders? Whitney also discusses the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, meditating upon Scripture, taking communion and fellowship with others of like faith, showing readers how to transform these often automatic enterprises into faith-building activities. He advises Christians to spend more energy enjoying God and developing a Christlike nature, rather than accomplishing ever-accelerating goals. He notes that seekers must be acutely aware that following Christ is a lifetime commitment and that they should resist the temptation to seek "spiritual" shortcuts to intimacy with God. This timely text is full of gentle admonitions to unearth deeply entrenched habits and dig for the treasure found only in a carefully honed relationship with God.

"...An updated version of some of Johnathan Edwards' best work, this book poses the questions we need to ponder..." -- Mark Dever

"...the questions the he supplies for this assessment not only help us examine our spiritual health, but...impart divine nutrition..." -- Bryan Chapell

Hart Responds to Baylys

2011-08-08T08:18:00.003-05:00

A few days ago, the Bayly Brothers reposted a blog containing a trenchant excoriation of 2K thinkers and pastors for not convening a Synod to address the present immorality of our government. Hart makes clear in his response that this sort of thing had been done before. I won't spoil any of the fun, but lets just say Hart offered a very helpful response involving the Presbyterian Church in the Civil War and Charles Hodge. Find it here.

Argument for Infanticide from Natural Law Fail

2011-08-06T16:28:00.004-05:00

A while back Steve from Triablogue posted an argument meant to demonstrate the absurdity of natural law theory (he had Catholics in his sights at the time). When I originally read it I felt his argument did not deal fairly with natural law theory. Since then, Steven (not the same Steven) has posted a response in which he notes the confusion of "nature" and "natural." Read the post to get the meat of it.

The lesson for today?

natural law ethics is not the view that nature, as in the world out there in the jungles, seas, etc., determines what is good for us and bad for us, but rather that our natures (in a technical metaphysical sense) determine what is good for us and bad for us.

Thanks, Steve.

The Unprofessional Book Review: The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins

2011-08-05T17:47:00.007-05:00

Philip Jenkins (a Catholic-turned-Episcopalian) has a way of making my world feel like it is on the verge of turning upside down. When I read The Next Christendom back in college, I started to feel my America-centric view of the universe coming undone. Now, thanks to The Lost History of Christianity I'm starting to lose my European-centric view of the history of Christianity. This needed to happen, and it was a long time a-coming.

In the same way that Americans think that World War II started at D-Day, we western Christians tend to forget (thanks, in part, to the book of Acts) that the Gospel didn't just go northwest after Pentacost, but rather, it went in all directions. I remember being in a history class and being told, "The Apostle Thomas may have gone east to India, but nobody really knows for sure. It could all just be legend." And I contented myself that something happened in the East, but that it was all lost knowledge.

Enter The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died. Quite a mouthful, I know. Enter Jenkins' book, smacking me across the face and reminding me what an anglo-European-centered Christian that I am.

Come to find out, there was a Bishop of Babylon, there were Christians in China, there were Christians in India, and Christians and Muslims lived along side of each other and influenced each other quite a bit in the Middle East (both for good and for ill). He spends so much time laying out the history of the Eastern churches that it's almost humorous when, in the narrative, the Catholic missionaries get to China only to find that these people already knew about the virgin Mary and were highly suspicious of these Catholics' orthodoxy.

Near the end of the book, Jenkins discusses in great length the reality that Christianity has not always been a successful religion in worldly terms. He says that Christians are used to success and often repeat quotes such as "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," but Jenkins says that a lot of times, the blood of the martyrs was just the end of the church because they all got killed and everyone was too scared to follow Jesus. In one of his most insightful sections, Jenkins suggests that Christians need to develop a theology of failure in regard to missions. The reason is, according to Jenkins, that "The ruin of Christianity in a particular region might confound Christians who have long been accustomed to seeing the expansion of their faith as a fundamental expectation."

What if Christians do make disciples of all nations, but subsequently lose them or their descendants? How can we account for such devastating reversals as the annihilation of the church in North Africa, the crushing of Catholic missions in Asia, and, above all, the strangulation of the faith in the Middle East? Presumably, each of these failures happened regard less of countless fervent but unanswered prayers. In terms of its global reach, only in very modern times has Christianity resumed the span that it had achieved a thousand years ago. Christianization, obviously, is not an inevitable process, nor a one-way road.

Though Jenkins does offer several thoughtful answers, I couldn't help but wonder how a real dyed-in-the-wool post-millenial thinker who thinks that it is the Christian's duty to emphasize transforming the culture would deal with this book. See - the book is full of failure. Just full of it. On the one hand, we see a Christianity that is always spreading before the rise of Islam, and on the other hand we see a culturally transformative Islam that grabbed the Christian world by the throat and brought it to its knees by seizing political power. When Christians tried to play by the same game, Christians lost and their faith virtually disappeared from the Eastern world. The pragmatist within me believes that a healthy amillennial understanding of the present age vs. the age to come offers the best framework for making sense of suffering, loss, and extinction in terms of the history of far eastern Christianity.

Jenkins does make statements which some will find controversial. For example, he says that the Bible has more violent commands than does the Qur'an (using Jericho as an example) and does not spend a lot of time discussing it. He is mostly concerned that Christians see the log in their own scriptures and not think of Islam in strictly radical/fundamentalist/hateful terms. He also argues that many things which we associate with Islam were actually adapted from Christian traditions first. The foremost example is that of prostration. Today, Christians think that it was an originally Muslim practice to pray while fully prostrated across the ground. In reality, early Muslims found this practice humiliating but eventually adapted it to themselves. In essence, Jenkins says that if we'd gone back a thousand years, we would have seen a Christianity that looked a lot more like Islam (at least on the surface) than the European-looking Christianity we think of today.

For some as well, the decision to discuss Catholic, Protestant, Nestorian, Coptic, Western, and Eastern Orthodox all together as Christian may be controversial. In a sense, he is speaking of Christianity as more of a social phenomenon, though he does get theological in some places. The difficult question for me was, "How can the only Christianity which the eastern world knew for at least 500 years have been a damnable heretical Christian sect (the Nestorians)? There are no lazy answers to these questions.

In Jenkins' conclusions after reviewing all of the failures in the far east, he has a lesson to share.

Instead of seeking explanations for the loss of divine favor, Christians should rather stress the deep suspicion about the secular order that runs through the New Testament, where the faithful are repeatedly warned that they will live in a hostile world, and a transient one. Nowhere in that scripture are Christians offered any assurance that they will hold political power, or indeed that salvation is promised to descendants or to later members of a particular community.

Jenkins continues a little later, reminding us that all of the states which the Christians strove to become a part of or impose themselves upon eventually either killed them or assimilated them.

Looking at the sweep of Christian history, we are often reminded of this message of the transience of human affairs, and, based on that, of the foolishness of associating faith with any particular state or social order. Even the Roman Empire was not to exist forever.

The Good News for the Whole World

2011-08-05T07:20:00.004-05:00

I've been reading Philip Jenkins' The Lost History of Christianity (which in most respects I recommend), and seeing this video causes me to react in a couple of ways. Yes, missions needs to happen - that is essential. However, reading Jenkins' book causes me to be suspicious that many areas and people groups whom we believe to be without the Gospel actually had it at one point. I'll talk about this after completing Jenkins' book, but for years Christians were arriving in places they thought did not know Jesus (Japan, for instance) only to find that there was already a centuries-old indigenous Christian presence in these places. This should be both a cause for optimism and also greater humility on the part of us western Christians - though such knowledge should not cause us to be lax at all in our enthusiasm to share Jesus with the world.

Thankful for Being Ignored

2011-08-04T12:20:00.005-05:00

After reading through the comments on a month-old thread at Greenbaggins, I should stop complaining about not getting any attention from the transformationalists. After 700+ comments, Greenbaggins shut the discussion down. I think you'll agree after reading through the comments - I am not ready to try and moderate a screaming match like that.

The Spectrum of Christological Heresies

2011-08-04T08:20:00.003-05:00

Denying Christ's Divinity	Ebionitism
	Subordinationism
	Adoptionism
	Arianism/Semi-Arianism
Denying Christ's Humanity	Docetism/Gnosticism
	Apollinarianism
	Monothelitism
Confusing the Two Natures	Monophysitism/Eutychianism
Dividing the Two Natures	Nestorianism

[Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology Page 475]

Does Edwards Deny Simplicity?

2011-08-03T21:37:00.002-05:00

It is a maxim amongst divines that everything that is in God is God which must be understood of real attributes and not of mere modalities. If a man should tell me that the immutability of God is God, or that the omnipresence of God and authority of God is God, I should not be able to think of any rational meaning of what he said. It hardly sounds to me proper to say that God's being without change is God, or that God's being everywhere is God, or that God's having a right of government over creatures is God.

But if it be meant that the real attributes of God, viz., His understanding and love are God, then what we have said may in some measure explain how it is so, for Deity subsists in them distinctly; so they are distinct Divine Persons.

Jonathan Edwards; Unpublished Essay on the Trinity

At first glance, this seems like it could be a departure from Thomas and the Scholastics, I have a real question for our experts on the Fathers or the Reformed Scholastics. Is it a traditional characteristic of divine simplicity that modalities of God are God just as much as His real attributes are God?

Treasure the Pleasures

2011-08-03T18:07:00.007-05:00

As I was working out today, I listened to my Kindle read Chesterton's Orthodoxy. I have an exquisite delight in Chesterton's elevation of the importance of art and poetry. This is largely because I have not a poetic bone in my entire body, and it is important to face our weaknesses head on or else spend eternity being hamstrung by them. Of all the things Chesterton says, I think the following may be my favorite:

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

In the meantime, I have also been reading very slowly through Walker Percy's wondrous novel The Moviegoer, which I will share my thoughts on at a later date. I felt quite spoiled today, however, having earlier in the day received this reminder from Chesterton to treasure the pleasures of life in whatever small measure they may come and then to see in Percy's novel the disconnection (and hence inability to enjoy) which comes from being a consumer rather than an enjoyer of what we've been given.