The Third Moment

Skepticism regarding "Youth Ministry"

2012-01-07T06:59:00.000-08:00

Young Christians leave the Church in droves, yet the only institutional answer seems to be that we need to pour more resources into "youth ministry." Perhaps youth ministry is the illness, not the cure. I don't think Christians should reject all aspects of youth ministry as facilely as we currently embrace it, but I think some honest assessment of the fruit and effectiveness of youth ministry is far overdue.

I dare say that the church has never seen the commitment of time, attention, and resources to youth ministry as we have seen over the last fifty years. And yet the pace at which youth drop out of the church seems only to have accelerated during this period.

To be sure, we need also to consider the possibility that youth would have dropped out at a much higher rate in the absence of youth ministries in churches, but that is a claim that also needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed.

Below is a skeptical documentary. I think it expresses too much assurance in its criticism of youth ministry, but it does set the ground for a discussion.

What we're listening to today

2012-01-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

Been in sort of a Glass mood. There's a lot I like. I like Floe from Glassworks quite a bit.

And also Pruit Igoe from Koyannisqatsi. It gets really good just before the midpoint.

Imprecatory Prayer in the Psalms

2011-12-30T12:31:00.001-08:00

I posted these thoughts previously, but a thought during Sunday school brought them back to mind, so I thought I'd repost. . .

I don't want to "get around" imprecatory prayers for sentimental reasons. I also reject C.S. Lewis’s idea that they exist in the Psalms as examples of the way we shouldn’t pray. I also don’t want to mitigate the problematic nature of these prayers merely by “spiritualizing” away the problem.

But it did strike me a while ago that that I pray imprecatory prayers against myself all the time, and I welcome others to pray imprecatory prayers against me as well. In his small catechism, Luther talks about us drowning the old Adam in us daily, that a new man should daily emerge. What is this but a prayer of imprecation against the old Adam in us?

God kills the old man (Col 3.3, Ro 6.2,6, Gal 2.20, 6.14,). This is the only “me” that exists prior to baptism, and this is a real death, it is a death more real than physical death. After all, in physical death the spirit separates from the body; the death of the old man is the extinction of this self.

I pray imprecatory prayers against myself, and welcome others to do so as well: I pray that every remnant of the old man would be cut off from this world. I pray that every remembrance of the old man would be forgotten, I pray that every cent of the old Adam's wealth be taken away and given to the new man, I want the entire legacy of the old man to die with him. Indeed, I bless the name of the one who dashes my Old Adam's little ones against the rock – for the rock is Christ (Mt 21.44) and, like me, they are killed in baptism so that the new man may emerge.

But if I want all of that for myself, then how can I deny it to my enemy, whom I am commanded to love as myself? So I pray that God would kill them as well through baptism, that the new man may emerge.

More so, isn't the prayer, "God forgive them, they know not what they do," in principle, a prayer of imprecation? After all, isn't it a prayer for the destruction of sinful man?

To be sure, God may destroy without converting. But that's his business. We are to take as our example God's actions in sending rain on both the good and the evil (Mt 5.45). So I pray that God drown the old man daily. I pray it zealously for myself, for his church, and for the whole world. The prayer for grace and forgiveness is a prayer of imprecation against the old, evil man.

More generally, God and his people are engaged in a holy war against Satan and his people, and the tools of this holy war are the Word and sacraments, and sacrifice on behalf of the world. Ironically, of course, and it is a delicious irony, God kills the evil one's people by giving them life.

"Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from life everlasting"

2011-12-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

A great discussion of several topics from Professor Ashford, a character in Margaret Edson's play, Wit. In the "it's-about-'life-after-life'" category and not "life after death" is Ashford's comments about the punctuation in the last line of a poem by John Donne. "Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life, from life everlasting." Wonderfully put.

"A Little Allegory of the Soul" -- "The Runaway Bunny" in "Wit"

2011-12-30T10:53:00.000-08:00

We watched the HBO production of Wit last night. (Meg and I watched it originally over 15 years ago.) The Pulitzer-winning play is by Margaret Edson. This production starred Emma Thompson. The penultimate scene has Vivian's mentor (actually, her dissertation advisor) visit her during her last minutes. Her mentor reads The Runaway Bunny to her, making a few trenchant observations about the story while doing so. Well worth viewing (as is the entire play).

The Global Entry Program

2011-12-16T18:55:00.000-08:00

I recently enrolled in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Global Entry program. It was a lot easier and quicker than I thought it would be.

Global Entry allows you to bypass the regular immigration line when flying into the U.S. from overseas (not including Canada or Mexico) and enter using your passport at a Kiosk (plus a scan of your fingerprints). After immigration, you can still get searched at customs, of course, but CBP puts a "CBP" sticker on your passport that's supposed to show the custom's agent and help move things more quickly there as well. We'll see.

Maybe because I lead such a boring life it's clear from the get-go that I'm a "low-risk traveler." But it took me maybe a week from application to approval - and it would have taken even a shorter time if I had been able to get to a major airport sooner than the week after I applied. (At the CBP office at the airport they took my fingerprints and my photo.)

The application asks for somewhat more information than, say, a credit card application, but it's a lot shorter than, say, a mortgage application. It took me maybe 30 minutes to fill out the application on-line.

Award Nomination for Prison Ministry

2011-12-10T08:15:00.000-08:00

This week I quite unexpectedly received a letter from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice informing me that the local prison unit where I lead the "New Man" program had nominated me for “one of the prestigious Governor’s Criminal Justice Awards.” A nomination does not of course guarantee selection – indeed, I believe that there are much-more involved volunteers out there who deserve the award much more than I, and I hope and expect that they will receive the actual award. But, to say the least, I was flattered – and totally surprised - that the Unit would even think of nominating me.

"Coming on the clouds" = Ascension in Mt 26.64

2011-12-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

First, for the moment let's ignore the question of whether Jesus is explicitly quoting Ps 110.1 and Dn 7.13 in Mt 26.64.

Whether or not there's an intertextual reference, it would seem that Jesus says in the verse that "sitting on the right hand of the might one" and "coming on the clouds of heaven" describes a single set of events, not two separate sets of events that are separated by thousands of years (or tens of thousands, or more, of years).

There are two items in the verse that seem to suggest that. First, note the timing of when Jesus says that the high priest and the Sanhedrin will "see" Jesus. Secondly, note the connection between sitting on the throne and coming on the clouds. I.e., the "and."

NIV: "From now on, you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."

ESV: "From now on, you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven."

NAS: "Hereafter, you will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

So whatever Jesus is referring to here, it would seem that he is describing two aspects of one thing, and this one thing will be "seen" by the high priest and the Sanhedrin starting very close in time to the point at which Jesus is then talking to them. ("From now on"; "hereafter.")

Secondly, now let's take the intertextual move. The reference to being "seated at the right hand of power" would seem to be the more obvious reference in the verse. As I understand it, first century Judaism understood Ps 110.1 to speak of the expected messiah. Hence the Sanhedrin's reaction when Jesus identified his claim to be the messiah (under penalty of perjury) by applying Ps 110.1 to himself.

Whether or not the members of the Sanhedrin understood Ps 110.1 to speak to anything like the ascension as it fully occured with Jesus, it certinaly does speak to an exaltation that provoked the Sanhedrin. And this exaltation is consistent with Jesus' actual ascension. Further, on the day of Pentecost, Peter expressly invokes Ps 110.1 as fulfilled in Jesus' ascension (Acts 2.34).

So we know that Ps 110.1 speaks to Jesus' ascension.

Now return to Mt 26.64. Given that Jesus refers to the seating at God's right hand AND his coming on the clouds in glory as coterminus events that would soon start, and continue, to occur, then I would submit that the "coming on the clouds" would have been understood by the Sanhedrin to refer to the same thing that the Sanhedrin would "see" when they saw Jesus seated at the right hand of power - namely, his ascended position.

Given the language, there is no reason to push up the timing of Jesus' "coming on the clouds" to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., let alone pushing it thousands of years into the future (so far) to refer to Jesus coming at the end of history.

This undertanding would seem to be fortified by Dan 7.13, where one "like a son of man" "comes" "with the clouds of heaven" and is presented before the Ancient of Days.

So we know that the "coming on the clouds" language does not have to refer to Jesus coming back to hear on the clouds, but can refer to this son of man coming to heaven for presentation before God the Father.

Given Jesus' statements in Mt 26.64, I'd suggest that the reference to Jesus presentation before the father would be the most reasonable understanding of his statement, and that that would be the way the Sanhedrin understood it and responded to it: Given that Jesus identifies himself in Mt 26.64 and throughout the Gosepls as the "son of man" and given that Jesus was taken up in the clouds in his ascension (Acts 1.9), and given that Jesus' ascension is the point he invokes by referring to Ps 110.1, and given that the "coming on the clouds" is linked temporally and in signficance to being "seated at the right hand of power," and given that this heaven-ward movement of the "son of man" is discussed in Dan 7.13, then it seems reasonable to understand Jesus' reference to the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven to be a reference to his ascension as well, and to think that that's what the Sanhedrin understood Jesus to be saying in his sworn testimony to them in v. 64 as well.

Your eternal life with God has already begun – So start living it!

2011-12-05T12:27:00.000-08:00

We hear it all the time – that the Christian hope is that we go to live in heaven forever with Jesus when we die. While there is a shade of truth to that statement, it misses a lot; it misses most of how Christians live in eternity.

The idea that Christianity is about going to live forever in heaven when you die not only focuses on a very minor part of our lives in the Age to Come, but it also creates a wrong sort of heavenly mindedness. It invites Christians to think that our eternal lives do not start until we die. In so doing it has us miss the big point that Jesus brought with him: that heaven has already invaded earth in Jesus Christ. Our eternal lives have already begun; we have already become heavenly people. And this realization cannot help but dramatically affect the way we live today. We are to live as the heavenly people that God has already created us to be.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s first discuss a narrower point before launching into the broader implications.

The narrow point: The eternal hope for the Christian is not, and has never been, to be a disembodied soul living eternally in heaven. The Christian’s eternal hope is the reunion of body and soul. To be sure, between our deaths and the resurrection of our bodies there is a temporary period of time in which Christians live as disembodied spirits in heaven. But Christians don’t live that way eternally. The Christian expectation is that we live eternally as souls embodied in resurrected physical bodies in a new physical heaven and earth (see, e.g., 1 Co 15.20,23, Jn 5.28-29, Rev 20.4-6, 13, Acts 24.14-15). This is the “resurrection of the body” that the Church has affirmed for millennia in the Apostles’ Creed.

But there’s a bigger point at stake than playing “gotch ya” with theological language. Talking about spending eternity in heaven with Jesus after we die obscures the fact that our eternal lives have already begun; we don’t need to wait until we die before we begin living it.

Jesus brought heaven to earth not so that humanity could inherit heaven at some distant future time, but so that people could start living with God now.

While verses could be multiplied, just consider what Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life” (John 5.24).

Note the verb tense. Jesus does not say that the believer “will have eternal life” when the believer hears his word and believes God. Jesus says that the believer “has eternal life” and “has passed out of death into life.” This is what the believer has now.

This is critical. We are God’s people, now. Jesus restored our lost fellowship with God, now. God has given us eternal life, now. Eternal life is not something that we begin after we die. Eternal life is what we have already been given, now.

And since this is true, now, then it cannot help but dramatically affect how we live, now.

We exist now as a new humanity (Eph 4.24, Col 3.10), bearing as children the image of the new Adam (1 Co 15.45, Ro 5.14) of the new Creation (Ro 8.29, 2 Co 5.17), himself the very image of very God (2 Co 4.4, Col 1.15). We live now as a heavenly people on and in earth (Eph 2.6, Phil 1.27, 3.20, Col 3.1, Heb 12.22) being Spirit-filled temples of God (1 Co 3.16), being the points at which heaven now meets earth. We live now as people of the Age to Come. In Christ, we, the church, now are the intruders in this fallen age. The New Creation has already been birthed in the midst of the old.

So our eternal lives have begun already, and we do not need to wait for our life-after-death to begin. Indeed, since God kills and resurrects us in baptism, in the most real sense our life-after-death has already begun. (Physical death, after all, is a piffle compared to spiritual death – from which we have already been resurrected, Mt 10.28.)

Talk about Christians doing “good works” doesn’t really capture the full picture here. Given that we are already a heavenly, eternal people, just what would we expect to be doing, except heavenly and eternal things? There is no hunger in the age to come, so we feed the hungry here. There is no nakedness in the age to come, so we clothe the naked here. There are no prisons in the age to come, so we go into prisons to visit the Christians there as we would visit Christians on the outside.

Yes, these things are “good works.” But they are perhaps more importantly just a reflection of who we are as an already-created heavenly people. The Age to Come is inaugurated already in the Church and in the Christian.

None of this is intended to push an overly-realized eschatology. Christians in this age struggle to drown the old Adam daily. But by pushing the start of our eternal lives as a new humanity into the future after we die, I believe that we sell short the new man that God has already created us to be in Jesus Christ now. This is to fight the old Adam with one hand tied behind our backs.
The Christian’s eternal life has already begun. We don’t need to wait to die to start living it. We are already living our eternal lives.

Tribute to British Soldiers who Died at Kohima

2011-11-24T08:10:00.000-08:00

Gerhard Weinberg quotes this verse honoring the British soldiers who died fighting the Japanese in India at the start of his 1994 book, A World at Arms:

"When you go home
Tell them of us, and say:
For your tomorrow,
We gave our today."

Heathrow

2011-11-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

I used to avoid Heathrow like the plague - unless I was connecting to a domestic flight in Britain itself, or unless I was terminating in London. I still have nightmares of huge, disorganized throngs trying to press their way to connecting international flights through the connecting international flights gate at Heathrow.

But Terminal 5 has seemingly changed all that. I've connected to international flights (both with British Air and other airlines) like six or more times this year, and the connections have all gone really well. The only point at which things get a bit clogged up is going through security again before moving into the boarding area. But even then it hasn't taken more than fifteen or twenty minutes - and sometimes a lot less. Of course, things now move a bit quicker since I again have sapphire status with the One World airline alliance, which allows me to use the "fasttrack" lanes at Heathrow.) And moving to Terminals 5b and 5c from 5a is increabily quick and easy.

So Heathrow is definitaely back on my "good" list.

Doha Airport

2011-11-23T15:35:00.000-08:00

I walked into terminal B of the airport at Doha, Qatar and wondered whether I had mistaken when the brand new airport was supposed to open. While it was still the old air terminal, the area for the different international airlines had been completely redone, and I wasn't sure where to go. Security was also completely different. All of it good - a lot quicker than in the old setup. And once I got through security, the waiting area (and the Oynx club) were all the same. I was really disoriented when I walked in, though. It was all wide open.

The funny thing is that all these updates to terminal B come just a few months befor the opening of a brand spanking new airport at Doha. So go figure.

What we're listening to this week

2011-09-29T19:39:00.001-07:00

I rewatched the movie, Stranger than Fiction, last week (enjoyable movie - and certainly my favorite Will Ferrell film). We've been listening to the soundtrack this week.

The kids like "Mind Your Own Business" by Delta 5 (as do I).

I'm also partial to "Whole Wide World" by Wreckless Eric.

Pope's Speech in Lutheran Church

2011-09-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

Benedict XVI made a brief speech in a Lutheran Church in Erfurt, Germany yesterday. He has a reputation for being something of a Luther scholar, although he doesn't seek to minimize the differences between Rome andn the evangelical church.

The conclusion of his speech identifies to phenomena that face modern Christianity - the growth of new sects that have little connection with Western Christinaity, and secularism.

I would like to make two points here. The geography of Christianity has changed dramatically in recent times, and is in the process of changing further. Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability. This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: what is this new form of Christianity saying to us, for better and for worse? In any event, it raises afresh the question about what has enduring validity and what can or must be changed – the question of our fundamental faith choice.

The second challenge to worldwide Christianity of which I wish to speak is more profound and in our country more controversial: the secularized context of the world in which we Christians today have to live and bear witness to our faith. God is increasingly being driven out of our society, and the history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems locked into an ever more remote past. Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization, and become modern by watering down the faith? Naturally faith today has to be thought out afresh, and above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day. Yet it is not by watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that we achieve this. This is a key ecumenical task. Moreover, we should help one another to develop a deeper and more lively faith. It is not strategy that saves us and saves Christianity, but faith – thought out and lived afresh; through such faith, Christ enters this world of ours, and with him, the living God. As the martyrs of the Nazi era brought us together and prompted the first great ecumenical opening, so today, faith that is lived from deep within amid a secularized world is the most powerful ecumenical force that brings us together, guiding us towards unity in the one Lord.

You can read the entire speech here.

Law, Fear, and the New Man in Christ: Transforming the “Got To” into the “Get To”

2011-09-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” (Matthew 25.31-46)

At volunteer training for prison ministry a few years back, the local representatives of a well-known group started by asking the small group what drew us to prison ministry. At my turn, when I mentioned Matthew 25, a disappointed frown flashed across the leader’s face. A few minutes later, seemingly in response to my comment, the leader talked about love rather than fear motivating outreach to prisoners.

The thing is, it wasn’t fear that motivated my involvement, or my reference to Matthew 25.

Thinking about this on the way home it struck me that when the group leader read Matthew 25, she saw threat and condemnation. While, when I read Matthew 25, I see a great promise.

To be sure, when we read what Jesus says to us in Matthew 25, what we read there can make us initially afraid. Ironically, I think that the promise Jesus gives to us there can scare us as much as the threat of judgment.

Even when we read the “positive” half of the passage we can recoil out of fear of the sheer magnitude of the tasks that Jesus lays out for his people, and what it means for our lives. After all, the tasks of clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and visiting the sick and imprisoned seem all consuming. There’s too much to do, how can we do it all? It overwhelms us, and we respond in a sort of guilty funk, turning the page, doing nothing, and praying that God forgives us.

To be sure, there is unmistakable law in Matthew 25. It condemns us, and we need to respond by asking that God forgive us for our neglect and inaction.
But too often it seems to me that we overlook the magnitude of the promise that Jesus also gives to his people in Matthew 25 – a promise of thrilling opportunity: the opportunity to meet Jesus in the hungry we feed, the naked we clothe, and the sick and imprisoned we visit. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

Which of us wouldn’t thrill at the opportunity to give a morsel of food to a hungry Jesus? Or to give a piece of clothing to a naked Jesus? Or visit Jesus in the hospital or prison? Christians would rush to the opportunity. We would do so not out of fear of judgment, but rather because of the great privilege it would be to meet any need of our savior.

To be sure, it is mind boggling that we could really meet any need of the One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps 50.10); the One who is the Lord of the whole Universe. Yet it is no more mind boggling than that the same sinless Lord would deign to die for the same humanity that rejected him and put him on the Cross. As with the salvation that God provides us on the cross, God also deigns, however inconceivably, to give us gifts by which we can also please him (Eph 2.10).
Take a worldly example.

When I courted my wife, Meg, I did not look at the time I spent time with her as some sort of obligation that I had to do. To put it ungrammatically, I did not think, “Today I got to share a meal with her. I got to spend time with her. I got to bring her a gift. I got to read the letter she sent me,” etc.
No. Instead I viewed (and view) these things as things that I “get” to do, not as things that I “got” to do. I’d think, “Today I get to take her to dinner, and I get to talk and spend time with her. I get to please her by bringing her a gift.” These were all things that I wanted to do, I didn’t think of them as burdensome obligations.

This difference between what we “got” to do and what we “get” to do seems to me to illuminate the difference between the confessional “third” use of the law and the “second” use of the law. Service to Christ is not something that we “got” to do, rather it is something we “get” to do.

As with our salvation, God has prepared good works for his people to walk in (Eph 2.10). As with receiving the grace he offers us through Jesus, Christians receive from God the good works he has prepared for us. These are things that we “get” to do, not things that we “got” to do.

The difference, however, is not merely one of attitude – although it is partly that. Rather the difference is the difference between the “old man” and the “new man” – both of whom wrestle within us. While the old man never stays forever drowned in this life, God offers his people gifts that we can receive that allow us to hold the old man under water longer than we can when we do not receive those gifts.
This is, I think, at least a part of what Paul means in Romans 12.2 when he writes that we should be “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” It is through this transformation, then, that Christians “will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

“Ah,” you may be saying to yourself, “there’s the catch, Jim. This is all just wordplay to make me feel guilty while saying you’re not trying to make me feel guilty.”

My answer is that that’s not the point at all. We miss marvelous opportunities when we listen to the Scriptures only through the ears of the old man.

For example, we commonly miss a critical turn in the way that God addresses his people in the Scriptures. Paul does not tell Christians to become holy by doing holy things. That would be the way of the “second use” of the law. Rather, he writes to Christians to do holy things because we are already holy. As one pastor put it, Paul instructs Christians to “be what you are.” He does not tell us to become what we are not. Jesus has given us what we need to be.

Consider, for example, the way that Paul instructs us in Eph 5.8: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.”

Paul’s lesson here is precisely the opposite of what so many of us hear. Paul does not tell us to live as children of the light in order to become children of the light. Rather, we are to live as children of the light because that is what we already are. Paul rather tells us what we already are in Christ – “children of light” – and therefore we are to live as what God has already made us.
Earlier in the letter to the Ephesians Paul argues in much the same way. He points to a whole bunch of do’s and don’ts in chapter 2. But he prefaces those do’s and don’ts with what God has already made us to be: In reference to your former manner of life, lay aside the old man, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

We are not re-created in the image of God because we do not sin. Rather, because we have been recreated as a new humanity in the image of our father – the second, better Adam -- therefore, we lay aside these sins. We have received a new nature from God, and righteousness flows from the new man as naturally as sin flowed from the old man.

So how do we transform our minds? As with our justification, it is not by what we do for Jesus but by what we receive from Jesus. We are initially freed from sin and death, receiving forgiveness and new life in baptism. We continue to receive his forgiveness in his Supper, and in receiving the words of the Gospel. God transforms us through the gifts that we receive from him at the Divine Service, from receiving his Word which is “living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4.12), from receiving the encouragement of his people (Heb 3.13), by being in communion with him in prayer, indeed, in receiving the good works that he gives to us to do (Ap iv.275-278). Worship, prayer, Scripture, fellowship (Acts 2.42-47). These are gifts that God gives to us, and they transform us.

Understanding good works as something that Christians “get to do” is not a matter of simply having the right attitude. “Attitude” is too subjective and dependent on us rather than on God. The new life that God has given us in Jesus Christ is an objective reality. It is more real than the “reality” of this current world, because unlike this world, which will pass away in judgment, the new life that we receive from God continues into the next Age.

The promise of God is that, in Jesus Christ, the Age to Come has already broken into the current age. In Christ his people begin living as people of the Age to Come while yet living in this age. To be sure, we continue to struggle against the old man, but the new man exists just as truly. And that is the thrill: we can start the eternal life that God gives us in Christ Jesus today, in this life. We need to drown the old man daily in this life. But we also daily get to put on the new man. And in this new man, works of God are works that we “get” to do, not works that we “got” to do.

On Reading

2011-08-08T10:56:00.001-07:00

Some contestable claims, but thought provoking. Here.

Mexican Immigration Already Down

2011-07-14T08:03:00.001-07:00

Michael Barone provides some interesting statistics here. According to his numbers, immigration from Mexico is down 80 percent from just a few years ago. Reasons? Increasing affluence in Mexico, and a birithrate that declined from about 7 children per mother to around 2 children per mother.

I've blogged about this already - but I predicted that the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico would disappear in 20 years. It might occur a lot earlier than that.

I think that the U.S. will be begging for immigrants in a decade or so as our population grows older and as immigration from Mexico (whether legal or illegal) decreases.

I wouldn't be surprised if we started to see immigration incentives again: Bounty payments for immigration, or even political incentives. In the 19th Century states like Washington allowed non-citizens to vote in elections. (Voter qualifications are set by statute. You actually don't need to be a U.S. citizen to be allowed to vote if the state in which you reside allows it.)

"As We Forgive . . ."

2011-05-29T17:33:00.001-07:00

I posted this before, but I'm mailing this meditation to the congregants who are in the flock over which I've been assigned as elder. So I thought I'd repost it here as well:

One of the happiest days of my life, now some years past, was the day I came across Mk 11.25. Or at least when this verse hit home.

In instructing his disciples about prayer, Jesus added this:

"And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your transgressions."

There's lots of interesting stuff to consider in the second part of the verse (and, of course, the bit about standing while you pray is pretty interesting as well), but I want to focus on the first half of the verse, and how emphatic Jesus is.

Jesus uses compelling words: "Whenever," "anything," "anyone."

"Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone."

To be sure, we pray regularly in the "Our Father" to "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." But that line usually comes and goes too quickly to implement it fully. So I slowed down, and in my prayer began to recall anyone whom I might have something against. Then I forgave them.

I know. It sounds stupidly simple. But while I had forgiven some people some sins before God, it wasn't a regular feature of my prayers. ("Whenever.")

Now the thing is, it's not as though I was standing around brooding about all thewrongs that people had done me during my life. I had a relatively normal middle-class life with a relatively normal childhood (enlivened a bit by a parent's manic depression, but not at all ruined by it).
In fact, I was surprised by what surfaced as I began to think about what "anythings" I had against "anyones." Things I hadn't thought about for years came to mind as I prayed. Matters in which I had been wronged, or had thought myself wronged. Stuff from big things, to absurdly trivial (and largely unintended) slights. I was sort of surprised at myself, that I had been carrying all of this stuff with me, a lot of it being really trivial childhood stuff. But there it was.
So as all this stuff came up, I forgave. And I was happy to forgive because Jesus had forgiven me. (I also repented to God for having not forgiven all these folk a lot earlier.)

The weird thing was, though, that as I began (and continued) to forgive, I felt my own heart changing, growing lighter and unburdened. This, again, struck me as odd, because I hadn’t really felt particularly burdened by the sins of others against me, and so hadn't felt particularly burdened by my not forgiving these folks. Yet when I finished my prayers and got up, I felt remarkably free and light.

The irony is that, in unburdening others of the debt they owed me, by God's grace I unburdened myself.

That struck me as pretty wild. And it still does. It is something for which I am profoundly thankful to God for allowing me to experience.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I always am, that God always gives a lot more back to me than I give to him.

In any event, it took several weeks before the stream of recollected (or perceived) hurts, snubs, and insults tapered off. I felt like a changed person. I felt a lot less angry. (Not that I thought of myself as a particularly angry person before forgiving as Jesus told us. This, too, surprised me; that I remained angry about some of this.)

Ever since then, for years now, forgiveness has been a regular part of my prayers. It’s been a source of great blessing in my life.

That being said, I still sometimes catch myself preferring to nurse a grudge against someone rather than to forgive them. I still shock myself at how I’m able to deceive myself. Days, sometimes weeks might go by. I’m not consciously aware of being unforgiving, and then I’ll catch myself. After I forgive them in prayer, I realize how I was clinging to my unforgiveness, nursing it by telling myself that the person didn’t really deserve my forgiveness.

I never really told myself that, of course; that would be too overt. But that was my attitude nonetheless, down deep. (My capacity for self-deception also rarely fails to shock me.)
Then I repent to God: What right do I have to begrudge the trivial sins of others against me, when God does not begrudge the great sins which I sinned (and sin) against him? This disappoints me, and still shocks me a bit as well: That even after all this time there remains a part of me that prefers to nurse grudges and prefers the squalid comfort of self-pity, rather than to forgive those who sin against me and enjoy the light and life that God gives me. But, thanks be to God, I often catch my self-deception sooner or later, and forgive.

The bigger point, however, is, as I mentioned above, that for years now, forgiving others has been a regular part of my prayers. Doing so has been one of the greatest sources of on-going blessing that I recognize. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. But it does. I am very thankful to Jesus for teaching me this lesson, inadequate pupil though I am.

"Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone."

Jack's New Sport

2011-05-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

Jack started taking diving lessons in late April. He's had maybe fifteen lessons so far. Yesterday was the first time he attempted this dive. I kid you not. He's 11.

We're Listening to Dorthy Love Coates Today

2011-05-23T17:21:00.001-07:00

Rerum Novarum

2011-05-16T06:54:00.001-07:00

This article does a decent job of discussing main themes in Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum. I believe that this was the first social encyclical and that Catholic social teaching, at least as a distinctive, modern line of thinking, is dated from this encyclical.

John Paul II's encyclical, Centesimus Annus (or "100 years") is dated from Rerum Novarum 's release.

True Rest

2011-05-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

Before Jesus' resurrection there are six resurrections in the Bible - three in the OT and three in the NT.

[i]. Elijah resurrected a widow's son (1 Kings 17.17-24); [ii] Elisha also resurrected a young boy. 2 Kings 4:20, 32-37. [iii] The dead man who touched Elisha’s bones, 2 Kings 13:20-21.

In the NT, Jesus [iv] Lazarus, Jn 11.21-46, [v] Jarirus' daughter (Mark 5.21-43), and [vi] the son of a widow in the city of Nain, Luke 7.11-17.

That makes Jesus' resurrection the seventh resurrection, chronologically, in the Bible. Sort of interesting - and I'm skeptical of biblical numerology.

Change in World Poverty since 1970

2011-03-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty amazing graph. The discussion is here.

Upper Deck

2011-03-07T00:12:00.001-08:00

The check-in person for British Air gave me a seat in the upper deck of the 747 to Heathrow. It's a small cabin pretty much all to its own. But flying into Heathrow was the neatest part - looking down on most of the other planes was a unique perspective from an airplane.

Heathrow is crazy.

University President Trivia from the Civil War

2011-02-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

A couple of items of university trivia.

Gen. William T. Sherman was the first president of the institution that became Louisiana State University. (This was before the Civil War.)

And after the war, Jefferson Davis was offered the position as first president of the institution that would become Texas A&M University, but turned it down to remain in the insurance business.

The Faith of Christ and Union with Christ

2011-02-05T02:05:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting article by Arthur Just reflecting on the implications of Richard Hays' book, The Faith of Christ, for Lutheran theology:

For Paul there are other themes in his theology, such as union with Christ or participation in Christ-the very title of a section of Hays's introduction: "Participation in Christ as the Key to Pauline Soteriology." Here again is Luke Timothy Johnson's assessment of the significance of this accent in Hays:

“He proposes that his position helps solve the long-standing debate between Pauline scholars over the question whether ‘justification by faith’ or ‘participation in Christ’ is more central to the Apostle's thinking. Hays says that it is a false opposition. If one grasps that the faith that makes righteous is Jesus' own faith and that his story is one in which, by Baptism, Christians have been incorporated, the two sides of the debate can best be seen as moments in the same narrative process.”
. . .
For Lutherans, there is much to reflect on here, challenging not only the way we think of Paul, but how we ourselves do theology. For both justification by grace through faith and participation in Christ are keys to our theology. Perhaps we have accented justification at the expense of participation in Christ which may explain why our sacramental theology has, until recently, seemed a secondary construct to our Christology and ecclesiology.
. . .
Richard Hays has opened up for us a window into Paul's theology through The Faith of Jesus Christ that places the atonement at the heart of Paul's gospel. The challenge for Lutherans is to maintain a sacramental theology that embraces both the apocalyptic aspect of the narrative substructure of Paul and his participatory soteriology. Hays did not engage in any formal development of this in his book, but he lays the foundation upon which such a theology could be formed. Who better to do this than a Lutheran, for who better could demonstrate through Paul's theology that the search for the historical Jesus ends at the Eucharist.

(Arthur A. Just Jr., The Faith of Christ: A Lutheran Appropriation of Richard Hays's Proposal, Concordia Theological Quarterly, Vol 70.1, January 2006, pp 14-15.)

Unexpected Punchline

2011-01-25T18:55:00.000-08:00

This is funny. Be sure to wait for Bob Hope's comment.

The Cost of Traveling Coast to Coast in the U.S.: 1850 versus Today

2011-01-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

An interesting item caught my attention while reading Gen. Sherman's memoirs.

In 1850 the U.S. Army reassigned Sherman from San Francisco, CA to the east coast. In his memoirs he mentioned that the passage from San Francisco back to the east cost $600.

What struck me is that even in nominal terms, the price of a airplane ticket from San Francisco to just about any east-coast city in the U.S. today is likely around $600. Actually less. I just priced a ticket from SFO to DCA for a February flight. It came in at $360 on AA.com.

So today, we can get from one end of the country to the other end of the country for less money and a lot less time -- several hours instead of several months.

The qualitative improvement would be impressive enough. But there's more. Annual income in the U.S. in 1850 (in 2005 dollars) was around $2,500. So it took about a quarter of a year's oncome (around 88 days at average wages) to pay for the travel from San Francisco to the east coast of the U.S.

Today average income in the U.S. is around $45,000 (in 2005 dollars). It takes the average worker about three days of wages to pay for a ticket to cross the U.S. in a matter of hours.

The difference in cost and quality between 1850 and today seems pretty amazing.

True Grit (No spoilers)

2010-12-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

The remake of True Grit is one of the better movies I've seen this year (and the best I've seen this fall). I do like the original -- and I like John Wayne in the original -- but Jeff Bridges gives a good performance here. With Wayne you're always aware that it's the Duke playing Rooster Cogburn. Jeff Bridges disappears into the character.

What we're listening to today

2010-12-31T13:28:00.001-08:00

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Big guy. Nice voice.

Potter and Tron (No spoilers)

2010-12-31T08:13:00.000-08:00

Not a great holiday movie season, at least for family films. Meg and I hope to hit a couple of the grownup films, but haven't yet.

Harry Potter: I don't have much to add to my comments from the sixth film here. Further, I thought the pacing of the first half of the seventh book, Deathly Gallows, too slow and plodding. The movie managed to keep to the spirit of the book in that regard.

Yeah I'll finish the series when the eighth movie comes out. But at this point I'm just going through the motions. The movies are just not that good.

Now don't get me wrong, despite all the quibbles I have with the novels, I enjoyed the book series. But my enjoyment almost entirely come from the background tapastry in the books - the faculty at Hogwarts, the Weasley twins, the "Scooby gang" around Harry, etc. But the Big Story wasn't all that interesting - centering Voldemort's agenda around blood purity evinced, in my opinion, a significant lapse of imagination on Rowling's part. And Harry wasn't as interesting as the characters around him.

Tron: Meh. A decent holiday film. I think the movie would improve in 3-D. (We saw it in 2-D because the 3-D time didn't work for us on the day we wanted to see it.) I thought it was better than the original Tron, which I thought was a bit of a bore, the cinematic advances of the film notwithstanding.

Why Boys Really like Acolyting

2010-12-30T13:49:00.000-08:00

Jack, my eleven-year old, started acolyting a few months ago.

I stayed back with him the first time he was to go forward. While we were waiting, he looked at me and said that he was excited to be acolyting.

I figured that he was excited to be participating more overtly in the worship service, or that he got to wear a robe, or that he sits next to the pastor during the service, etc.

But no. The cause of his excitement?

"I get to carry fire!"

Voyage of the Dawn Treader (No Spoilers)

2010-12-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

This movie is better than Prince Caspian, but then that wouldn't be hard. The screenplay is only very loosely based on C.S. Lewis's book -- so it makes it a bit of a tough slog for me, since Voyage is my favorite of the Narnia series. That said, I thought the screenplay worked for the most part. It nicely trusses up the relationship between Eustice and Reepicheep more than the book. And they did keep the ending (an absolute must).

Still, as with the Potter series, much of the charm of the book lies in the secondary and tertiary relationships and settings. Stripping down the screenplay to the basics of the plot (which is a stretch in this movie), in my opinion, means that much of what makes the books engaging is lost.

Young Adults Leaving Christianity

2010-11-20T22:00:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting article posted on-line at CT.

The only thing I'd add to the article is to note an irony: The young adults who leave Christianity are young adults who, as youth, received the treatment of an unprecedent focus of manpower and resources on "youth ministry."

Now, perhaps all of this expenditure and manpower focused on youth ministry in fact reduced an even greater outflow of youth from the church that would have occurred without it. But somehow I doubt it.

Now I'm open to empirical evidence, but every VBS about trains or the Australian outback or whatever signals one thing consistently: that Christianity is not something to be taken seriously. After all, if Christianity were something to take seriously, adults would not truss it up with all of the infantilizing accouterments that seem de rigeur for VBS.

Don't get me wrong. I do not believe that serious stuff needs necessarily to be boring stuff. But engaging children in serious matters is not the same thing as trying to sneak serious matters in for them under the guise of entertainment.

Bin Can Can

2010-11-16T19:05:00.001-08:00

Jack and I were playing a (very simple) string bass/piano duet of the "Can Can" this evening. (More accurately, the "Can Can" is The Infernal Galop from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld). Looking around youtube for a version of the "Can Can," I found this Bin Can Can. It's pretty well done.

Here's another amusing version of the "Can Can," borrowed from Offenbach by the composer Saint-Saëns for his Carnival of the Animals - Tortoises.

Too Funny

2010-11-13T19:40:00.000-08:00

I saw that Tim Burton was making a film out of this book. If the movie is half as funny as the title, it'll be pretty funny.

A Few 2010 NIV Comparisons

2010-11-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

I've never been a huge fan of the NIV - almost always prefering the NAS. Nonetheless, BibleGateway recently moved to the NIV 2010. Already I've noticed several differences - all for the better. Here are a few examples:

Old Eph 2.3
"All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath."

New Eph 2.3
"All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath."

Old Mt 26.64
"'Yes, it is as you say,' Jesus replied. 'But I say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.'"

New Mt 26.64
"'You have said so,' Jesus replied. 'But I say to all of you: From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.'"

Old Eph 2.14
"For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace . . ."

New Eph 2.14
"For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace . . ."

On Eph 2.14, I suspect that "new man" is likely closer to the Greek, but "new humanity" highlights Paul's Adam theology better than "new man." (And, yes, the shift to "humanity" probably resulted to make the passage less gender specific. But I think that "new humanity" still draws bolder attention to Paul's argument in that passage relative to "new man.")

"Real Clear Religion"

2010-11-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

Real Clear Religion joins Real Clear Politics, Real Clear Markets, Real Clear World, and Real Clear Sports.

Like the others, the website provides daily links to articles and commentary on religion.

Constitutional Interpretation

2010-10-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

Wayne ("Carrifex") asked for some references on constitutional interpretation. I list several below. The first three are basically "conservativie" theories of interpretation. But most folks don't realize that "originalism" is not the same thing as "textualism"; indeed, "originalism" can give answers diametrically opposite "textualism." The last citation is more of a criticism of orginalism and textualism, although I've only skimmed through it briefly. (Justice Stephen Breyer has a book out as well, although I haven't had a chance to read it.)

Whittington writes well and is extremely smart.

Keith Whittington, Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999; paper 2001)

Keith Whittington, "The New Originalism,” Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy 2:2 (Summer 2004): 599-613, can be downloaded here.

Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton University Press, 1998).

American Constitution Society, It’s a Constitution We’re Expounding, Collected Writings on Interpreting Our Constitution (2009).

Mount Rushmore

2010-10-17T12:15:00.001-07:00

I could see Washington and Jefferson on Mount Rushmore from my window. I'd guess they're maybe half a mile away. And they're lit up for the first part of the night. Impressive. (Although the general area is really touristy. I visited Rushmore as a child as well - I remember it being really touristy back then as well.)

I've been "discussion leader" for a conference on executive power and the Constitution for a small group of high-school teachers from Kentucky. We're at a lodge just outside of Keystone.

It was a good group of teachers, and good material.

At the beginning of the last session I asked them each, if they got to choose, which presidents would they place on Mt. Rushmore today?

About a half would keep it the way it is (which is a disappointment - Teddy simply does not belong on Mt. Rushmore). Most of the rest would replace Teddy with FDR. One would have replaced Thomas Jefferson with James Madison.

Interestingly, more teachers would have dropped Thomas Jefferson from Rushmore than would have dropped Teddy Roosevelt. I don't think that anyone dropping either Washington or Lincoln from Rushmore. A couple of folks would have placed Andrew Jackson among the four.

But one teacher did suggest the list I'd put on Mt. Rushmore if I got to choose who would go up there today: Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. The closest call on my list is FDR. He should never have run for a fourth term (given how incredibly ill he was at the time), and many of the early New Deal policies were terrible. (E.g., establishing price floors for foodstuffs while people were starving.) Nonetheless, his presidency did represent a sea change in the nation, both on account of the New Deal, but more so because of WWII.

What we're listening to these days

2010-10-03T17:06:00.001-07:00

Some Philip Glass. Here's a link to Floe from Glassworks.

And quite a bit of Bach.

This is Jack's favorite right now.

This is Megan's favorite right now.

This is my favorite right now. Well, and this too.

How Star Wars V (The Empire Strikes Back) Should have Ended

2010-09-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

Too funny.

A Good Reading of the Parable of the Unrighteous Steward (Lk 16.1-13)

2010-09-17T06:34:00.001-07:00

This sermon provides what I think is a very compelling read of the parable of the Shrewd Steward.

The upshot is this: the unfaithful steward is the scribes and Pharisees. Their response to being discovered as unfaithful stewards by Jesus "should" be to reduce the burdens of those they've burdened (think, e.g., of Lk 11.46 & Mt 23.4). In response, Jesus, their master, would praise them.

Jesuit Joke

2010-09-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

A Dominican priest told me this joke. It's pretty funny:

A Dominican and a Jesuit were talking.

Dominican: "So, brother, I understand that the Jesuit order was founded to fight the Protestant heresy."

Jesuit: "Aye, brother, that is true, that is true."

Dominican: "And I'm sure you know that the Dominican order was founded to fight the Albigensian heresy."

Jesuit: "Aye, that's what I understand, brother, that's what I understand."

Dominican: "So . . . seen many Albigensians around recently?"

Everyone is Resurrected; Everyone Exists Forever

2010-09-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

No, I haven't become a universalist (ug).

This is sort of an "un, duh" thing. But orthodox Christianity has always taught a general resurrection -- i.e., that everyone, good and evil, is resurrected from the dead.

Paul, for example, proclaimed before Felix:

"But this I admit to you, that according to the Way which they call a sect I do serve the God of our fathers, believing everything that is in accordance with the Law and that is written in the Prophets; having a hope in God, which these men cherish themselves, that there shall certainly be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked" (Acts 24.14-15).

And Jesus taught:

"Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment" (Jn 5.28-29).

And, "All the nations will be gathered before Him . . . These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Mt 25.32, 46).

And Daniel:

"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt" (Dan 12.2).

So everybody is resurrected, and everybody exists forever. "Eternal life" and "eternal death" are not contrasting eternal existence versus annihilation. Rather, the contrast is that of being eternally united with God (eternal life) or separated from God (eternal death).

After all, God told Adam and Eve that the day they ate of the Tree they would surely die (Gn 2.17). And they did die, being driven out of the Garden and separated from God. Eternal death, or eternal destruction, is being eternally separated from God (2 Thes 1.9).

But if "life" is defined as a person existing forever, then in point of fact Chrisitianity has always taught that everyone lives forever.

Believing in Jesus is not a means to avoid death understood as annihilation or non-existence. It's a question of where we spend eternity - with God or without.

Funny Flight Connections Today

2010-09-04T14:38:00.001-07:00

So my flight from D.C. started an hour and twenty minutes later than scheduled, due to a suddenly sick pilot.

So I arrive at DFW for my connecting flight home about three minutes after they closed the doors and cleared the flight for take-off. It did not matter that the plane was still sitting there, connected to the walkway. And it did not matter that the electronic monitor stated that the flight was delayed ten minutes. The gate agent would not open the door. He said he couldn't. (The flight delay occurred after the gate had been "closed," so the fact that it was sitting there supposedly didn't make a difference -- I still could not board.)

O.k. so I had like five hours until the next flight home. So I go enjoy a leisurely lunch, and then head back to the boarding area. I get all set up -- connect my computer to an outlet, access WiFi, get my earphones out to listen to my Itunes & etc. All set up for a long wait.

Then almost immediately I hear an announcement over the PA system "ticket holders to College Station may now reboard." I look around to see who made the announcement - it was a gate agent right behind me.

What apparently happened was this: The flight never took off, but pulled back to the gate after I left for lunch. In the meantime, because of mechanical problems, the airline had to exchange planes, all of which took almost exactly the time it took me to eat lunch and return to the boarding area.

While I doubt the other passengers shared my pleasure, I've never been as pleased with a flight delay as I was by that flight delay. So I arrived home around 2 p.m., instead of 6 p.m., as originally scheduled.

All in all, the airline issued me five different tickets for the two segments.

The Bible is not about us, it's about Jesus

2010-08-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

Good, pithy job.

HT: Reepicheep

The only thing that I'd want to beef up is that Jesus is not merely revealed in the people in the Bible, he's also revealed in the law. We often miss that.

For example, we read Gn 2.24 as pertaining primarily to human marriage rather than to Christ. I.e., we read it as applying first to the type rather than to the antitype. But Paul doesn't read it this way:

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall be come one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.”

The first application is to the antitype – Christ and the church. The second application is the type, i.e., human marriage. (So, too, cf., 1 Co 6.15-20, although it’s a bit more blended there. Still, the focus is on the implication for our union with Christ.)

I'd suggest that the first application of the adultery laws in the OT is to Christ's relationship with the church.

After all, in the OT, there is far more extended discussion of idolatry as spiritual adultery than there is discussion of human adultery. But, still, we read the sex laws in the Law of Moses almost exclusively anthrocentrically rather than Christocentrically (or Yahwehcentrically, as the case may be).

This despite the fact that Christians know that the law reveals Christ first, as the speaker points out (Lk 24.27, 44). This means that the law on polygamy, the law on taking interest, the laws and theft and murder and etc., first reveal Christ – and I mean that it reveals to us the person of Christ directly (and his relationship with his people), not just stuff about the ethics for his people.

And don’t we see this explicitly in Moses as well? E.g., Exodus turns at the Golden Calf incident. But isn’t the bitter waters test in Nm 5 a development of the rite that Moses implemented in Ex 32.20-21ff?

To be sure, this doesn't at all mean that the Bible doesn't apply to us. It certainly does. But the Bible is radically Christocentric, and we miss a lot of that by the way we read the Bible looking for "life lessons" for us.

We also miss the way that, e.g., the parables reveal Christ to us. We read them anthrocentrically rather than Christocentrically. I dicuss the parables here.

Study Reports that College Students are Studying Less

2010-08-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a story from the Boston Globe, reporting on a forthcoming article in the Review of Economics and Statistics that college students study less today than they did in previous decades.

The Boston Globe article discusses several theories for why this might have happened.

First, the authors of the study itself suggest that teaching evaluations might have caused this. I.e., less demanding faculty receive higher evaluation scores from students. To the extent that pay raises and promotions are based, in part at least, on student evaluations, then they provide incentives to faculty to reduce demands on students. Or it could just be that faculty like to be liked, and so court higher evaluations by reducing demands on students.

A second theory is that students are busier today than they were in past decades, mainly because more students work during college in order to pay for higher tuition and fees.

A third theory is that access to computers decreases time that students would count as studying, but really is just time wasted finding a book in the library.

One theory discussed only in passing in the article is one that seems plausible to me: The greatest decline in study time came between 1960 and 1980. During this period there was a huge increase in the number of students going to college. But the increased enrollment came at a cost: the marginal student was less prepared for college than previously. Increased retention came along with increased enrollments, and than meant that course requirements needed to be lowered for all students to avoid flunking out the less prepared marginal student.

That said, I'm not entirely convinced that the article gets it right. The Globe also reports that high school seniors have been studying a lot less than previously. While my kids are not yet in high school, my impression so far -- and from other parents -- is that they are studying a lot more than I did at their age. To be sure, a lot of the studying, in my opinion, is pointless busy work. Nevertheless, they are in the habit of studying several hours every night, and quite a few hours on the weekends.

Sin, Forgiveness, Sacraments and the Gospel

2010-08-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

A solid presentation of the Gospel (Word and sacraments fully integrated) along with some solid wisdom from a young man.

HT. Pr. Paul McCain

"No Hiding Place Down Here" on Babylon 5

2010-08-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

We're watching the entire Babylon 5 series on Netflix's instant viewing. Episode 20 of season three is named after the Gospel song, "And The Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place Down Here." You can listen to the entire song here.

In an jarring juxtaposition, interspersed with a Gospel singer singing the song on B5 itself (as a result of another part of the story), we see Lord Refa being beaten to death by a group of Narns on Narn, led by G'Kar -- there is "no hiding place down there" for Refa. (Refa was set up by Londo, but I won't recap that aspect of the story.)

The title verse is, "I went to the rock to hide my face, but the rock cried out, 'no hiding place.'" It's apparently a reference to passages such as Rev 6.6, "they said to the mountains and to the rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.'" The threat of judgment in the song sits oddly to my ear with the joyful music. This seems to happen a lot in "Gospel" music, however. In any event, it is a toe tapping tune.

The juxtaposition of the Gospel song with the vicious beating death of Lord Refa did remind me a bit of the brutal scene in The Godfather, where the Corleone family makes its move by killing a bunch of competitors, all interspersed with a baptism scene in which Michael "renounces the devil and all his works." Chilling stuff.

Several LCMS Schools Fail Ed Dept's Financial-Strength Test

2010-08-12T15:18:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that several of the Concordia colleges fail the Department of Educations financial-strength test for non-profit schools. Concordia Theological Seminary-St. Louis is included on the list. You can read the article here.

A number of Christians college and seminaries are on the list, including Covenant Seminary in St. Louis.

Summer movies (no spoilers)

2010-08-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

Inception - "eh" with a shoulder shrug. I didn't resent the movie, but it seemed longer than its 2+ hour length. I'd choose The Matrix over Inception almost any day.

Salt - a lot like the "Bourne" movies, although stupider. I do like the Salt character herself, and perhaps the sequels won't have such a stupidly over-the-top story line.

Despicable Me - the screen play teeters a bit at several points. But overall a touching, if predictable, film. It worked for me.

David Mamet is a Conservative - Sort of

2010-07-30T07:27:00.001-07:00

Here's an interesting article by Terry Teachout on playwright David Mamet's conservatism (defined largely by his respect for markets and support for Israel).

I've been a fan of Mamet's for some time. He wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed the Plow, and other plays, he wrote screen plays for The Untouchables, The Verdict, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and others, and wrote and directed films such as Heist and Things Change. But I only followed his professional work; I had no idea about his newly expressed "conservatism" until this article.

Two Reagan-Era Jokey Sayings

2010-07-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

Spent the weekend at a conference that included a couple of semi-old movement conservatives. During discussions at different points they reminded the group of two Reagan-era jokes-with-a-point.

The first takes aim at activist government. It goes that the standing order to executive agencies during the Reagan administration was: "Just don't do something, stand there!"

The other is darker, but still funny: "Why do we need more missiles? We haven't used the ones we already got!"

Assocation between Spending on Public Schools & Test Scores

2010-07-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

Here are some striking data from Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute.

The Out 4 Life Conference in Texas

2010-07-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned below, I attended Prison Fellowship’s Out 4 Life conference in San Antonio last week. The conference focused on prisoner reentry into society. Here are a couple of thoughts and observations.

First, there was something of an irony in that the officers of several organizations that ran transitional housing talked about the need to extend their ministries into prisons, because they couldn't do enough with ex-prisoners during the short time they were in transitional housing. This was something of an irony because my interest in the conference stemmed from my concern that in-prison ministry has little last effectiveness beyond the walls because of the lack of support upon release. Perhaps this is version of the grass-is-always greener syndrome.

Nancy La Vigne, of the Urban Institute, gave a keynote speech in which she discussed results of a study regarding factors that affected prisoner reentry in Houston. (You can view the research report here http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412100-life-after-prison.pdf.)

While La Vigne took care to say that her findings were statistical “associations” for most of the speech, she did slip into causal language (as many investigators do) in the conclusion of her talk.

In almost all of these studies there is a real problem with causal inference. To wit, there are positive associations between all sorts of factors (e.g., in-prison job training) and prisoner reentry success. The temptation is conclude that these factors cause the lower recidivism rate for prisoners. But there’s a huge self-selection problem there, in that the prisoners who choose to receive in-prison job training prior to release may be precisely those inmates who are most likely to succeed upon release, and not recidivate. To put it another way, the statistical association could merely be a reflection of the behavior of inmates with individual characteristics that lead them to choose in-prison training and also lead them to be more successful on the outside than prisoners without those characteristics. The upshot is that we do not know from the statistical associations that the in-prison programs “caused” the higher success for participating inmates upon their release.

At little more pointed is that it’s unclear what impact in-prison ministry has on the long-term success of prisoners once released. To be sure, I do not think that lower recidivism rates is why Jesus instructed his disciples to go into prisons. That said, if in-prison ministries truly bring the Gospel to the prisoners, then one would expect fruit to follow believing inmates both in and out of prison. (Of course, just how much the Gospel affects the behavior of professing Christians who have never been in prison in the same question – and the level of significance there is not entirely clear either.) So I wonder whether I have any real impact on lives of those I visit in prison, and I wonder how much marginal impact I should reasonably expect to have when I see men for several hours a week over a period of several months. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in serious doubt about the need to go into prisons to visit prisoners. But the social scientists in me wonders whether there are any measurable results, not only to my own personal ministry, but to interventions more generally, both of religious and non-religious programs. The evidence to date seems scant. I chatted with La Vigne briefly after her talk, and she admitted that, for all of her and others’ studies in the area, evidence allowing causal inferences of success is little, and not particularly compelling.

I did learn a lot about transitional housing at the conference, and a lot about some important, if modest, things that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is pursuing to help with prisoner reentry. There were a number of TDCJ leaders at the conference, and I have to say I was impressed with their commitment to helping with reentry with extremely limited resources. And I think that my view was shared by many of the other participants – many of whom came to the conference with highly skeptical views of just how intent TDCJ is toward helping with reentry issues.

More than anything, I think I was hoping that I could come away with some penetrating insights into successful transitional housing for released prisoners. What I learned mainly just confirmed what I had already learned from my time on the Board of Directors of a local transitional residence for released offenders. The house closed after a year or so. I was asked to join the board after it had already started. It quickly appeared to me that the “business model” for the residence was fatally flawed in its inception, and the residence could not be sustained. The residence closed within six months, mainly because of the inability of the Board to locate a full-time manager for the facility (and that was due to the inadequate financial support for a real manager, and for the facility more generally). The upshot is that there is no quick and easy means, and lots of pitfalls, to set up transitional housing facilities for released prisoners. I guess that’s not a surprise, but I had hoped, perhaps naively, that someone had worked out a business model that could be easily copied and transplanted. No such outcome, however.

Happy Birthday, America

2010-07-04T09:38:00.001-07:00

Here's one of my favorite Charles Ives' compositions, Variations on America. No July 4th is complete without listening to it.

I like the concert band version a bit more than the various organ versions, but here's a link to an organ version. I'm not sure which Ives composed for originally, however.

Too Funny -- Russian Spies in Deep Cover

2010-06-29T16:49:00.000-07:00

From an article in England's The Guardian:

"They couldn't have been [Russian] spies," said Jessie Gugig [a neighbor]. "Look what she did with the hydrangeas."

You can read the entire article here.

Toy Story 3 (No spoilers)

2010-06-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

Took the family to see Toy Story 3 last night. Good movie. I'd might even be tempted to say that it was the best of the three. More than being just fun, it's even moving at several points. It certainly touches on themes of friend, family, and loss in a deeper, more adult way than the first two films (which is saying something, given that the first two movies center on those themes as well).

The quality of Toy Story 3 contrats sharply with the end of the Shrek movies. While I thought Shrek 2 was pretty good, the third and fourth installments in the franchise were eminently forgettable, IMHO.

The Center for Followership Studies

2010-06-24T08:32:00.001-07:00

It seems as though there are a bajillion centers for leadership studies, and just as many books and seminars and programs to develop "leaders."

Blah. Jesus marvels at the centurion's faith in Matthew 8. The centurion recognized Jesus' authority not only because the centurion was a man with authority, but also because the centurion was a man under authority as well. He understood authority because he understood followership as well as leadership.

I remember once being surprisingly moved watching the Prince of Liechtenstein kneel at a mass to receive the sacrament of the altar. Ignoring that he's the prince of a really, really small country, the experience promoted me to frame what I think is a pivotal question that I to ask myself, and ask of others: To whom do you bow the knee? I think this is a particularly important question for American men, in particular, who, outside of the military, are rarely called to submit explicitly to other people.

Given the centurion's lesson -- that he learned authority by first being under authority -- I think that this is a critical question for men who wish to lead. To whom do you (or have you) bowed the knee?

To be sure, all of us bow the knee in one sense or another to our parents. Yet as Tocqueville observed so long ago in Democracy in America, even family life in the U.S. is incredibly democratic in comparison to what exist then in Europe. (And, for the most part, I think that's a good thing.)

But I do think that we do have something of a problem in that American society pushes us to rush past our experience as followers in order to become leaders; we value leadership but not followership.

Indeed, I suspect that in democratic societies the experience of true followership is all the more critical for would-be leaders precisely because it is so less experienced in daily life than it is in more aristocratic societies.

But that would seem, to me, to make the establishment of centers for followership studies all the more important in democratic societies than in aristocratic societies, and yet we aren't interested in followership precisely because our characters are so unreflectively democratic.

McChrystal

2010-06-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

Matthew 8.8-9:

"The centurion replied, 'Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, 'Go,' and he goes; and that one, 'Come,' and he comes. I say to my servant, 'Do this,' and he does it.'"

Nebraska to the Big 10?

2010-06-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Wow. Rumors today are that the University of Nebraska will join the Big 10. I confess, stick-in-the-mud that I am, I always missed the old Big 8, with its OU-NU rivalry, Colorado, Missouri, and, occasionally, Iowa State and KU in the mix. I always resented UT's intrusion into the mix.

That said, I think that the Big 10 will be better for NU than the Big 12. Not regarding sports, but academically. Just about every Big 10 school is academically strong, unlike the Big 12. ("Oklahoma State" - 'nuf said.)

Maybe the old NU joke will become a reality: NU academics will become something that the football team can be proud of.

Robin Hood (spoiler alert)

2010-05-29T19:32:00.000-07:00

I took the family to Robin Hood on Friday. I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I would -- and I mean that in just as backhanded a way as it sounds. To be sure, it is a perfectly adequate bit of summer fluff. I must confess, however, that quite a bit of my enjoyment derived from the many amusing anachronisms in the film.

My most favorite of these by a wide margin was the inclusion of a 12th-Century version of "Higgins boats" that the French king used in the movie to land his troops in his invasion of Britain. Of course, Higgins boats in the 12th Century were, appropriately enough, made of wood and rowed by oarsmen.

If you don't know what these craft were, Higgins boats are thoroughly modern inventions used to deploy troops in 20th century amphibious assaults. They were used widely throughout WWII, including, of course, in the Allied invasion of France on D-Day. (So the fact that the French were using these to invade Britain seven centuries earlier is all the more amusing.)

I just about fell out of my chair laughing when I saw the French invasion army landing in a flotilla of these in the movie.

And, of course, there were a lot of other anachronisms as well -- thoroughly modern political sensitivities and gender roles not being the least of these.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not at all a purist in these sorts of things in film. Still, for all the pretensions this movie ostensibly has to not being Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, at the end of the day Russell Crowe's Robin Hood is not one whit more serious than its earlier cousin. That's not a problem, however, if this movie is received as the piece of thoroughly enjoyable fluff that it is. The only difference is that Errol Flynn knew he was making a piece of thoroughly unserious fluff. I'm unsure that Russell Crowe is quite as self aware.

Texas Conference on Ex-Offenders Transitioning to the Outside

2010-05-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Prison Fellowship began a much-needed program to help ex-offenders transition successfully to the outside. They're hosting a conference in late June in San Antonio, Texas. The link to the web announcement is here. I don't know all that it will cover, but PF usually does a good job at these sorts of things.

Most of my experience with prison ministry has been with in-prison work. (I did sit on a board for several years that ran a half-way house for ex-offenders.) But if I came to one conclusion it was that the men needed a lot more assistance in making the transition to the "outside" than organizations or the government provided.

The difficulties that even strong Christian men face when making the transition to the outside are daunting: They are torn from the social support of their prison church, they face the need to find a means to support them (no mean feat for ex-cons), and they often face residual hostility from folks on the outside and rejection from by their families. In short, at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives, they have almost no social or financial support structures to draw on. It is incredibly difficult, and so it is little wonder that recidivism rates are as high as they are. It is not at all that criminal activity of any sort can or should be excused, but the current system is a tragedy for almost everyone involved.

The half-way house that I was involved with ultimately had to close -- it proved impossible to find full-time staff for the facility given the resources it had to draw upon. (I wasn't asked to come on board until after it had started and had run into difficulty. While I did what I could to sustain it, in my opinion the "business model" was fatally flawed at its inception.) I'm hoping that I can learn about successful transition programs to support financially and, potentially, to get involved with.

Liturgical Movement in the Revelation

2010-05-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

The "movement" in Revelation follows Jesus' ascension, and the significance of that ascension. In the book we see, as it were, movement from the Holy Place to the Holiest of Holies.

At the beginning of Revelation, we see Jesus attired as the high priest, standing in the Holy Place -- the anterior room to the Holiest of Holies. We know this because of the presence of the seven lamp stands (Rev 1.12, cf., Ex 25.37). This is, as it were, where the normal course of daily religious business went on for the OT priesthood -- taking care of the lamps, changing out the show bread on the sabbath & etc.

But with Jesus' death, resurrection and ascension (in particular the ascension, the implications of which is the particular focus of the Revelation, Rev 1.7 w/ Dan 7.13), humanity once again gets to approach and dwell with God. We see this in the movement from the Holy Place in Rev 1 to the Holiest of Holies in Rev 21.

Before getting to the argument, however, recall that the significance of the ascension is not that the Second Person of the Godhead sits enthroned in heaven. God is always king over all. The significance of the ascension for redemptive history is that once again a human sits enthroned in God's very presence and over the earth. This is the position that Adam ceded to Satan by believing Satan's word rather than God's word. Jesus, the second Adam, takes back what the first Adam lost. (A lot of the book of Revelation is about this precise point.)

In the OT, God's special dwelling presence was localized in the Holiest of Holies, which was a cube-shaped room in the Temple (1 Kings 6.20).

When we get to the new Jerusalem in which there is no sun and moon because God's glory and the Lamb illumine it -- and where God dwells with his people -- we see here, too, that the shape of the city is shaped in a cube like a huge Holy of Holies(Rev 21.16).

So we see this overall movement, not only in Revelation, but throughout the Scriptures. The movement of humanity, as it were, is first exile from God's presence in the Garden in Genesis 3. This is illustrated in the almost total exclusion from the Holiest of Holies in the OT. (Even the high priest did not fellowship with God in the Holiest of Holies, but was still separated from God's presence/throne by the cherubim.)

Salvation history then is completed with the reestablishment of this relationship (albeit, in a glorified fashion) in the New Jerusalem in the greater Holiest of Holies.

We see this broad "movement" in Revelation itself, from the Holy Place in chs 1-3, "through" the door to the action in the Holiest of Holies in Rev 4.1. (The action here of course implicates what happens elsewhere in heaven and on earth, so the "action" is not thematically limited to the Holiest of Holies subsequent to Rev 4.) To the now eschatologically-finished Holiest of Holies, which is the New Jerusalem.

The Gospel in the OT Alien & Sojourner Laws

2010-05-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

So two posts below I quote several OT passages dealing with how Israelites were expected to treat aliens and sojourners.

These really are a remarkable set of laws, particularly for that time (or even for this time).

So a couple of observations.

First, modern Christians tend to treat the hospitality statutes as sort of second-order laws. They're not the ten commandments, they're not talking about lying or sex or murder. Conservative Christians tend to view their invocation with skepticism, because they're usually invoked by this-worldly liberals. (I guess my attitude is that if Balaam could be rebuked by his ass, then conservatives can be corrected by liberals, no matter what their intention.)

But I want to pick up on the centerpiece of the hospitality laws, because in point of fact, I think we scarcely see the gospel presented more clearly than in those laws.

Who is the alien and the sojourner before God? Fallen humanity is.

In Leviticus 25:23 God tells Israel, "The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and sojourners with Me."

Sinners are outcast before God. Yet like the prodigal son's father, rather than despising us, God has mercy on us.

Hence, the centrality of the hospitality laws in OT Israel: She was the alien in Egypt. God welcomed her into the holy land, even though they were also aliens before him. Israel was to show forth God's love by welcoming aliens as God had welcomed them. They could not reject the alien without rejecting the very basis by which they were welcomed into a relationship with God in the promised land.

To be sure, the U.S. is not OT Israel, and the OT laws are not binding on modern nations as they were on Israel. The hospitality laws are fulfilled first in the church. (And there's enough to convict us there -- given the social, economic, and racial stratification of most churches these days.)

Nonetheless, I cannot help but believe that whatever kind of claim a nation can have to being a "Christian" nation, that a significant part of that claim must be tied to how and whether it welcomes aliens into its midst.

The U.S. has been blessed richly by God -- so much that it boggles the mind. Most of these blessings have come upon the descendants of immigrants to the U.S. And now many Americans want to shut the door; they want keep God's blessing to ourselves and not share them. As the world thinks, we're scared that if we have to share our blessings that we'll lose them. So we seek to hold on ever the more tightly to what God has given us.

In doing so we do not understand the divine inversion -- that to keep the blessing we need to give it away. The open hand is never empty, but the closed hand loses what it grasps.

We need to work to open the borders, first, of our churches -- making sure that everyone, everyone, feels welcomed there. And, secondly, if the U.S. is to have any pretense to being a Christian nation, then our borders must be open as well.

Another Thought about Immigration

2010-05-21T14:16:00.000-07:00

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Some Thoughts About Immigration

2010-05-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

Leviticus 25:35
"Now in case a countryman of yours becomes poor and his means with regard to you falter, then you are to sustain him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you."

Leviticus 19:34
"The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God."

Numbers 35:15
"These six cities shall be for refuge for the sons of Israel, and for the alien and for the sojourner among them . . ."

Deuteronomy 10:18-19
"He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. "So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt."

Deuteronomy 14:29
"The Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance among you, and the alien, the orphan and the widow who are in your town, shall come and eat and be satisfied, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hand which you do."

Deuteronomy 23:7
"You shall not detest an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not detest an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land."

Deuteronomy 24:20
"When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow."

Deuteronomy 24:21
"When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not go over it again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow."

Ezekiel 47:22
"You shall divide it by lot for an inheritance among yourselves and among the aliens who stay in your midst, who bring forth sons in your midst And they shall be to you as the native-born among the sons of Israel; they shall be allotted an inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel."

Malachi 3:5
"'Then I will draw near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me,' says the LORD of hosts."

Samuelson on "The Welfare State's Death Spiral"

2010-05-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

Whether you want to celebrate it or lament it, demographic changes in Europe and the U.S. means that social insurance as we know it (a.k.a. "the welfare state") cannot be sustained at current levels. Robert Samuelson makes the argument here.

I'd add that globalization merely speeds to process -- it can neither solve nor prevent the problem.

There are two consequences to note.

First, the problem of "illegal immigration" will solve itself in 20 years or so. Maybe less. The U.S. is going to be begging for Mexican workers to immigrate to the U.S. in order to work here, and to pay the taxes necessary to sustain the aging Anglo population. This will prove increasingly difficult as Mexico continues its economic development -- soon enough, wages in Mexico will rival those in the U.S., thus deterring any incentive for Mexican workers to immigrate to the U.S. (whether legally or illegally).

Secondly, while globalization means wage supression in advanced industrial countries, it means increasing wages in developing countries. Knowing that doesn't necessarily make it easier for U.S. workers, but the fact is that average wages across the world increase as a result of globalization, even if they decrease (or don't rise as quickly) in the U.S.

Just too funny -- "Sunday's coming"

2010-05-08T06:41:00.001-07:00

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

HT - Maison D'etre (a.k.a. "The Presbyteer")

Not eating Unclean food is the puzzle

2010-05-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

We often refer to the "Old Testament" when talking about Moses, as if the two were synomous. But that's not the case.

Take the question of eating "clean" and "unclean" foods "in the Old Testament."

Well, that distinction does not inhere in "the" Old Testament, rather, it is a Mosaic innovation.

After all, God tells Noah in Gn 9.3 that “everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything."

Recall that there were "clean" and "unclean" animals for Noah (Gn 7.2), although these apparently do not map directly onto the Mosaic dietary laws, since "clean" animals for Noah apparently included all birds and animals that creep along the ground (Gn 7.3, 8).

So the puzzle isn't why the "Old Testament" restriction on eating certain foods lifted in the New Testament, the puzzle is why God placed the restrictions on Israel in the first place, after giving permission to humanity to eat every kind of animal. (See here for my answer.)

Getting the flow points to the exceptionalism of the Mosaic covenant, and points again to the overall teaching of the book of Hebrews, that the Mosaic covenant teaches its own contingency. I.e., it was the exception to the previous Biblical history, which then begs the asking of the question, why? And that's the fruitful question to ask the New Testament authors.

Infant Baptism, Infant Faith, and Infant Confession through Godparents

2010-04-27T07:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a comment I posted on another Lutheran blog when another comment raised the issue of rejecting infant baptism:

Some people say that infants should not be baptized. But the Bible teaches otherwise. In 1 Co 10, Paul notes that everyone in Israel — infants as well as adults — were “all” under the cloud and that “all” passed through the Red sea, and that “all” were “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (vv. 1-2). Paul then twice writes that this event serves as an example that the Christian church needs to follow and learn (1 Co 10.6, 11).

It is worth emphasizing that Paul points to Israel's baptism as a nation in the Red Sea. And Paul expressly says that Israel's baptism in the Red Sea serves as an example for the Christian church to follow. So when we then think biblically about the Great Commission that Jesus gave us -- that we are to make disciples of the nations by baptizing them i.e., by baptizing the nations -- then we cannot help but draw upon the single example of a national baptism that God gives us in the Scriptures, and that is Israel's national baptism, which included the baptism of "all" who were in Israel, including the little babies.

So, too, Peter says “Repent and be baptized, everyone of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2.38). Peter then expressly states that this promise is for the children of his hearers, as well as for Gentiles who are far off.

In response, people who say that infants should not be baptized say that Peter’s promise does not apply to babies, because babies cannot repent.

But let’s consider what the Bible actually teaches that babies can do: Infants can praise God (Ps 8.2) and can be filled with the Spirit (Lk 1.15). So, too, the Scriptures teach us that infants can fall down and worship God (2 Chronicles 20.13 with 18). Similarly, “little ones” (which is the Hebrew word translated as “children” by the NIV), “stand in the presence of God” (Dt 29.10-11), and enter into a covenant with God which “confirms you this day as his people, that he may be your God” (Dt 29.13).

So when talking about whether babies can have faith, what do we believe? God's word or human eyes?

To be sure, infants cannot do all those things by themselves. That's why we have their parents and godparents speak for them before God. The Bible teaches this as well. The Bible teaches that representatives can speak for and represent those who can't. The “whole congregation of the Lord,” which includes infants, is said to “speak” through only a few representatives (Josh 22.14-16). And “all” are said to “hear” when only the representatives hear (Josh 23.2, cf., 24.1-2). So, too, “all” are committed when representatives gather before God (2 Chr 5.2-3, cf., chs 5-7, esp., 6.3, 7.4). The Bible’s representative principle extends to generational representation as well (Dt 29.14-15). So, too, in baptism, adults speak for and represent the infant. Godparents speaking for infants is Biblical. And, thus, the Apostolic practice of baptizing "households" (Acts 16.15, 33, 18.8, 1 Co 1.16) is entirely nonproblematic for Lutherans.

The Bible makes clear that baptism is for “all,” and that the forgiveness promised in baptism is explicitly also “for our children.” The Scriptures teach us that infants can do all things that believers do – stand before God, fall down and worship God, praise God, and be members of God’s people. Just as representatives in the Bible speak for the whole assembly of God—including infants—parents and godparents can speak for their children, expressing their faith and their repentance. The form of baptism used in Lutheran churches is entirely consistent with what the Bible teaches us about God’s relationship with the infants of believing parents. All of us are saved by baptism into Jesus Christ, adult and child alike.

Finally, as for the thief on the cross. God blessed him, but it's simply and obviously wrong to draw conclusions contrary to the Scriptures from exceptional circumstances. Jesus gives us the general practice: He tells his church to make disciples by baptizing them and teaching them his word. You thereby nullify the Word of God by trying to make a rule out of an exception.

Top Fifty "Conservative" Rock Recordings

2010-04-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

Now this is a fun article from National Review Online; the "top fifty" conservative rock songs. There are several to take issue with, and several to consider. Surprising to me are the number of anti-abortion songs on the list.

One entirely bogus song on the list is “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” America has been committed from its inception to the proposition that "all men are created equal." American conservatives own that proposition, since it is ours. The Confederacy rejected that proposition and, hence, whatever it was, it is not, and cannot be, conservative; nor can their modern-day sympathizers.

One song I might be tempted to add to the list is Pink Floyd's "Another brick in the wall." Here's a recording. While I'm not at all an educational radical, it does seem to me that, of necessity (which is not to commend it), every form of institutionalized education, whether governmental or private, devotes an inordinate amount of time to administrative matters of enforcing "discipline" in classrooms. I.e., rather than communicating knowledge, teachers devote time to making sure that students conform to their own standards of conduct. However necessary it may be, it's nonetheless tragic -- tragic for the teacher, for the entire class, and for the student(s) who receive the bulk of the teachers' attention.

And while I'm in a somewhat more-libertarian mindset than usual, I might also add "Little Boxes" to the list. Although I do recognize that "Little Boxes" is not a Rock song. (And, yes, I do think that Pete Seeger is one of the most annoying people in the world. But this is a classic rendition of the song.)

The Best T.V. Episode, Ever

2010-04-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

Buffy the Vampire Killer was a wildly variable show overall. I didn't watch large portions of most seasons because the episodes were pretty bad. But the episode in season six, "Once More, With Feeling," was a great show. It was a musical composed by the director, Josh Weedon, that managed not only to be good music, but also advanced the story. The episode is worth watching in its entirety if you have the chance, although it is for grownups only, not for youngsters. Here is one of the show's great songs.

The second greatest T.V. show ever is also a Buffy episode, and also the creepiest, Hush. Definitely not for children either.

Psalm 2 in Acts 4

2010-04-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

When Peter and John were released in Acts 4 by the high priest, the rulers, elders, and scribes of Israel, they returned to the disciples. Acts 4.25-26 then records the disciples reciting the beginning of Psalm 2 together:

"Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples devise futile things? The Kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his messiah" (Ps 2.1-2).

Back in Acts, Luke then records the disciples saying, "For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel . . ." (Acts 4.27).

There's lots of interesting stuff here. First, I had always taken Psalm 2 to be a description of the response of Gentiles to the Messiah, and the extension of his reign over them.

And so it is that, certainly.

Nonetheless, note that the disciples apply Psalm 2 to what just happened to Peter and John at the hands of Israel's leaders. That's interesting for one of two reasons.

First, if Psalm 2 is about the extension of the Messiah's reign over the Gentiles, then it is signficant that the disciples are now grouping Israel with the Gentile nations. While interesting, there's nothing novel in that -- Jesus centers true Israel upon himself and his disciples.

A second possibility, however, suggests itself -- that Psalm 2 not only prophesizes Gentile opposition, but explicitly prophesizes opposition from Israel's rulers.

Consider v. 2 of Psalm 2: "The Kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his messiah."

We know that "earth" can be translated as "land." Indeed, throughout John's Revelation, it almost always should be understood as "land," as in "land of Israel."

In which case, while v. 1 of Psalm 2 discusses Gentiles, v. 2 of Psalm 2 is a prophesy of opposition to God's messiah from Israeli officialdom.

The fact that the disciples apply Psalm 2 to the actions of the high priest and other Israeli leaders lends credence to this thought, as well as the followup statement quoted by Luke. After quoting Ps 2.1-2 the disciples say:

"For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel . . ." (Acts 4.27)

This follows directly on the quotation of verses 1 and 2 of Psalm 2. That is, that gathered together in Jerusalem were BOTH Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles AND the PEOPLES of Israel.

"Peoples of Israel" in Acts 4.27 tracks with "people" in Ps 2.1b, and the kings and rulers of the "land" in Ps 2.2 track with Herod, the high priest, and the elders and scribes of Israel.

If correct, then Psalm 2 expressly prophesizes the opposition of official Isreal to her Messiah.

Nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but I had never considered that those parts of Ps 2.1-2 might directly apply to Israel, even though I must have read Acts 4 who knows how many times.

"Artemis Fowl" Gets Right What "How to Train Your Dragon" Gets Wrong (Spoiler Alert)

2010-04-13T17:26:00.001-07:00

I enjoyed How to Train Your Dragon. Cute film. The one point of the movie that I needed to ignore, is what happens when Hiccup cuts the injured dragon ("Toothless") loose from being twisted up in the net. Toothless begins to attack Hiccup, but then lets him live.

It would be a shorter, less enjoyable movie if Toothless didn't show mercy to Hiccup in response to the mercy Hiccup showed the dragon, but we all know that you can't release an injured, wild animal and expect it to be grateful to you. If it doesn't run away, it will attack.

Better this from Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl:

"The troll was concussed, blinded by blood and lame. A normal person would feel a shard of remorse, but not Butler. He'd seen too many men gored by injured animals. Now was the dangerous time. It was no time for mercy, it was time to terminate with extreme prejudice."

Exactly.

Link to Review of New Bonhoeffer Biography

2010-04-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

I'm unsure of how much there is new in the new biography -- I never heard the spy stuff before, but I did know about the influence of Bonhoeffer's American visit on his faith. There's a brief review here; the link was sent to me by a friend.

Hyperbolic Paraboloids are Yummy

2010-03-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

Megan recently had a lesson on hyperbolic paraboloids. So we looked them up. We found that they're really yummy. So now the children ask for them by name -- hyperbolic paraboloids. Yum!

Does God's Chariot-Eagle Really Eat Human Flesh?

2010-03-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

None of the several commentaries I refer to when developing my classes on Revelation discuss in the context of Rev 19.17-18 that the birds that are assembled to eat the flesh of God's enemies are those that fly in "midheaven." Ignoring that, the commentators (correctly) point out that being food for the birds is a sign of the curse (see, e.g., Dt 28.26). This is pertinent given the traditional interpretation that Rev 19 teaches the unredemptive destruction of God's enemies.

But I wonder.

I see redemption in Rev 19 -- the harlot city of Rev 19.1-6 (and of Rev 17-18 & etc.) is transformed into the Lamb's bride in Rev 19.7-10 via the means identified in Rev 19.11-21. In particular, the Gentiles are redeemed by the Jesus' Word in Rev 19.15, and the Jews are redeemed by Jesus' Word in Rev 19.21. Particularly the latter folk -- those who bear the mark of the beast (idolatrous Israel) are literally a part of the harlot city (Jerusalem), but nonetheless are redeemed by Christ's Word. (This is the Dt 28/30 pattern I discussed a few days ago.)

So the idea that the birds eating the flesh of God's enemies is a sign of a cursed judgment seems dissonant with the larger trajectory of redemption in the passage. Hence, my wonder whether commentators are getting the nature of the birds right here. That said, the Word has a double-sided effect -- its cut can convict unto redemption or unto the hardening of the heart. I don't really oppose that view, but I do want to push a bit on the nature of the birds that do the eating in Rev 19, and push back a bit on the notion that the flesh-eating birds here are necessarily a sign of the curse.

Here's the text: "Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he cried out with a loud voice, saying to all the birds which fly in midheaven, 'Come, assemble for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of commanders and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of those who sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great.'"

As I mentioned above, what makes me wonder is the additional detail that the birds feasting on the flesh are those that fly in "midheaven."

The Scriptures to discuss birds that fly in "midheaven." To wit, in Rev 8.13 we have this: "Then I looked, and I heard an eagle flying in midheaven, saying with a loud voice, 'Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, because of the remaining blasts of the trumpet of the three angels who are about to sound!'"

This "eagle" here would seem to be one of the four beasts or faces on God's glory chariot -- Ez 1.10, 10.14, Rev 4.7. As we see below, God's chariot flies in the firmament between the heaven and the earth, i.e., in the "middle" heaven ("mid-heaven") between the highest heaven where God dwells and the lowest heaven where clouds float and ordinary birds fly.

So the one example we have of the type of bird that flies in midheaven is of a bird that talks and warns, even prophesies (Rev 8.13), and is a beast on God's glory-chariot (Rev 4.7, cf., Rev 12.14).

Without putting too fine a point on it, do we really believe that the beasts on God's glory-chariot eat human flesh? Or is it possible that these beasts eat flesh in the same way that the sword that comes out of Jesus' mouth in Rev 19.15 & 19.21 are "killed" by Jesus Word Sword? I.e., they are killed, and resurrected. So here, the mid-heaven birds consume the corrupt flesh of the harlot city, allowing the rebirth of the Harlot-City as the redeemed Bride-City.

More generally, recall that Paul writes about being caught up to the “third heaven” (2 Co 12.2), which implies the existence of a first and a second heaven. Scripture also often speaks of “highest heavens” Dt 10.14, 1 Kings 8.27, Ps 68.33.

The “first” heaven is, presumably, the earth’s air in which ordinary birds fly and rain clouds float (Gn 1.20, Ps 8.8, Dt 11.11).

The “second” heaven would appear to be the firmament itself (Gn 1.8), or mid-heaven. This is, presumably, the heaven through which Jesus penetrates and passes through in his ascension on his way to God’s throne room (Heb 4.14, Eph 4.10). This is also that heaven in which the beasts of the glory-chariot are set, including the Eagle. Ex 26.31, Ez 1.22, 26, 10.1. This is also where the cherubim are set -- recall that the veil in the tabernacle/temple had cherubim woven into it. It is through this that the high priest must pace when entering the holiest of holies, cf., the guardian cherubim in Gn 3.24.

The “third” or “highest” heaven, then, is presumably God’s throne room which is above/with the waters above the firmament (Ps 148.4).

So I take the birds of midheaven eating the flesh of those slain by the sword coming out of Christ’s mouth to mean that the flesh of the folks who were slain by the Word of God have died utterly, and a new man born from the corpse (cf., Ez 37).

Conservative Opposition to Health Care Leads them to Embrace Plebiscitary Democarcy

2010-03-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

I oppose the current health-care bill, but a lot of conservative/Republican commentary over the bill is silly and annoying. One of the more annoying arguments in my book is the argument deployed by all stripes of conservative commentators about how the health care bill should not be enacted because polls show that a majority of Americans currently oppose the bill.

Well, shoot, as the old conservative adage used to go, "America is not a democracy, it's a republic." (In this context we should recall that Madison famously, if idiosyncratically, defined a "republic" to be a "representative democracy.") That is, a central political truth about the U.S. is that it is a representative democracy, and not a democracy in the pure sense of direct rule by the people. The Constitution's framers thought that was a good thing, not a bad thing. Ironically, it was the Progressive's who criticized representative government for blocking the will of the people. And now conservatives have adopted the Progressive's rhetoric of attacking constitutional principles to serve in a policy debate.

So now it's the conservative ox that is getting gored, and conservatives now discover that they love plebiscitary democracy. It's just nonsense. I think it's proper to attempt to leverage political opposition to the bill by pointing out to legislators that they may put their political careers at risk by voting for the bill. But that's a different argument than saying that Congress should not enact the bill today because over 50 percent of the American public opposes it, as if popular opposition to a bill had some sort of normative claim on what Congress can or should enact today. That claim -- now deployed by conservatives -- is one that undermines the theory underlying the U.S. constitutional system. Real conservatives do not employ that argument.

Spinal Tap -- Gimme Some Money

2010-03-20T11:54:00.001-07:00

I played this once for Megan. Then she began going around the house singing the song. Then Jack picked it up also. It's a really funny song from Spinal Tap's "sixties" phase.

Even if "Deem and Pass" is Unconstitutional Does Not Mean that Courts would Strike Down the Health Care Bill

2010-03-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

I think that there is a credible case that "deem and pass" enactment of the health care bill would be unconstitutional -- the procedure seems to require "contingent" passage of provisions in a bill , which a fair reading of the language in the Constitution (art. 1, sec. 7) doesn't seem to allow. But just because the enactment procedure would be unconstitutional, does not mean that courts would strike it down as unconstitutional.

There are two judicial doctrines that might prevent courts from ruling on the constitutionality of a law enacted (or purportedly enacted) via a "deem and pass" process.

First, there is something called the "enrolled bill" doctrine. This doctrine provides that once a law is enacted by the legislature and signed by the president or governor, courts will assume that the law was enacted following proper legislative procedures. The rule seems aimed largely to prevent laws from being struck down when passed in good faith, but some technicality in the legislative process was ignored. For example, the texts of a senate bill and a house bill have minor language variances and, therefore, are not technically the same bill.

That said, there are some questions about the application of the doctrine to "deem and pass." First, courts do not necessarily apply the doctrine absolutely; some courts say that the "enrolled bill" is only evidence of the bill, and are willing to push back behind the executive signature to look at the text of the bills the respective chambers enacted. (I don't know how much further beyond the chamber enactments courts have been willing to push, however, which would be important in this case.) There are also suggestions that the enrolled bill doctrine has less application in cases where constitutionally-required rules were ignored, relative to rules adopted by each chamber for its own governance, but are not constitutionally specified.

Another reason that, even if "deem and pass" is unconstitutional, a court would not strike it down, is the so-called "political questions" doctrine. Here, as a matter of another constitutional principle -- the separate of powers -- courts refuse to involve themselves in constitutional judgment dedicated to other branches of the government. E.g., federal courts have said that whether a state has a "republican form of government" (as required by art. 4, sec 4) is a judgment given for Congress to make rather than the courts. As a result, the courts would be usurping congressional prerogative by making that judgment, and therefore courts refuse to make the judgment. (Interestingly, the text of Article 4, however, does not state that this judgment is given exclusively to the Congress.) It seems possible that the courts would conclude that whether a bill has "passed" a legislative chamber is constitutionally committed to the chamber itself, or to Congress as a whole and that, therefore, the courts will not review the judgment out of separation-of-power concerns.

So simply concluding that "deem and pass" is unconstitutional does not resolve the matter of whether Congress and the president could nonetheless use the procedure to enact a law that the courts would allow to be implemented.

One final note -- folks today often think that judges are the primary enforcers of constitutional requirements against politicians who ignore those requirements. That position would have shocked the framers of the U.S. Constitution. While they recognized the need for auxiliary precautions against unconstitutional actions, the primary enforcers of constitutional principles was supposed to be the people themselves in the ballot box. It is a dereliction of the constitutional duty of the people for us to hand that responsibility over to judges.

We're listening to "Spirit of the Century" by the Blind Boys of Alabama

2010-03-17T17:31:00.000-07:00

The songs on the album are largely a bluesy-gospel sort of thing. Very nice. The show, "The Wire," used their version of "Way Down in the Hole" as its theme song in the show's second season. You can listen to the song here.

The Chiastic Argument for the Sufficiency of Scripture in Irenaeus's "Against Heresies"

2010-03-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

Looking through some old posts I ran across this one, which I posted some time ago. I still like the argument, so I thought I'd repost.

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, wrote Against Heresies toward the end of the second century, A.D. In book III of Against Heresies, Irenaeus advances an extended argument about the sources of truth for the heretic and the Christian. Roman Catholics often point to Irenaeus’s discussion as an early recognition of tradition as a source of authority independent from the Scriptures.

The funny thing is that, years and years ago, I read Against Heresies, as it were, as an innocent. I was simply interested in reading some of the early church fathers. A few years later, when I was in conversation with a pious, Roman Catholic academic, he appealed to Irenaeus's argument at the beginning of book III as establishing the independent authority of tradition, and the primacy of the bishop of Rome in the Christian church. That surprised me, because while I recalled that tradition and Rome were discussed there, I had actually taken the overall import of Irenaeus's argument in book III to be one in favor of the Scriptures as a sufficient authority for the Christian.

Just to be clear, let me underscore that I understood Irenaeus’s argument to be one of the sufficiency of the Scriptures for the Christian, not the necessity of the Scriptures for the Christian. Indeed, even in Protestant churches, unlearned people receive the Gospel orally from preachers rather than directly from the Scriptures themselves. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, provided what is orally communicated is consistent with what the Scriptures teach. Indeed, there really isn’t much of an alternative, as a practical matter (Ro 10.14).

But the thing is, in my reading, I never got the upshot of Irenaeus’s argument to be aimed at establishing tradition as an independent source of doctrine not taught by the Scriptures, nor that the Roman church had unique authority relative to other churches that were established by the apostles. It's of course possible that I misread Irenaeus's argument, but on revisiting it in my conversation it didn't seem to me that I had gotten it wrong, and my Roman Catholic discussant said that he agreed after all that the argument from that text wasn't as strong as he thought it had been.

I understood Irenaeus’s argument to have a chiastic structure that aims at vindicating the Scriptures (again, as sufficient authority, not as necessary authority). It seemed to me then, and seems to me today, that understanding the overall arc of Irenaeus’s argument requires understanding the chaistic structure of his argument in book III. Doing so seems to me to pretty much eliminate the idea that Irenaeus is arguing for tradition as an independent source of authority for doctrines not taught in the Scriptures.

I’ll sketch what I take to the Irenaeus’s chiastic structure in the early chapters of Book III, then I’ll copy part of the text (below). I encourage any interested reader to read the unedited text, which can be found in numerous books and on the web. My goal when I first read Irenaeus (not knowing the role it played in RC apologetics) was to give the text a sympathetic reading, and that continues to be my goal.

Anyway, here’s how I understand the structure of Irenaeus’s argument at the beginning of Book III:

A. (3.1.1-2) We learn salvation from what the apostles preached in public & “handed down to us in the Scriptures.”

B. (3.2.1) When confronted with Scripture, the heretics say that we need tradition in order to understand the Scriptures rightly. This is an oral tradition of doctrines not contained in the Scriptures.

C. (3.2.1) When confronted with orthodox tradition, the heretics reject tradition.

C’. (3.3.1-3) If you say you believe in tradition, you at least have to accept the tradition in the church of Rome because we can trace the succession of bishops there. The heretics can't point to any better candidate for authoritative tradition than that. (Nonetheless, the tradition is manifested in churches “throughout the whole world," but it would be "tedious" to reckon succession in all churches.)

B’. (3.4.1) Tradition confirms what the Scriptures teach.
i. “For how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings?”
ii. How else could illiterate people know the Gospel?

A’. (3.5.1.) Therefore, on the basis of their own argument, the heretics must accept arguments based by an appeal to the Scriptures. And so I will "revert" to appealing to Scripture as authoritative refutation of heretical doctrines.

Irenaeus goes on to use the authority of the Scriptures as the conclusion of reductio arguments against the heretics. For example, in 3.11.9, Irenaeus argues:

For if what [the Valentinians] have published is the Gospel of truth, and yet is totally unlike those which have been handed down to us from the apostles, any who please may learn, as is shown from the Scriptures themselves, then that which has been handed down from the apostles can no longer be reckoned the Gospel of truth.

There only reason that he can advance this argument is that he thinks that he has already established that the Valentinians must accept the authority of the Scriptures. Hence, if he can show that their argument is inconsistent with Scriptures, then he's made his point, and the Valentinians must reject the disputed doctrine in favor of the orthodox affirmation.

There is lots to learn from Irenaeus that doesn’t concern modern disputes over the source(s) of authority for the church. Nonetheless, Irenaeus seems to me to teach us two things in the context of arguments between Rome and Wittenberg.

First, tradition is the best that people can do who do not have the Scriptures or who are illiterate. Indeed, if there were no Scriptures there would be no alternative to learning the Gospel from what was handed down orally. But in Irenaeus, tradition is a second-best alternative to the Scriptures. It would be used if we do not have the Scriptures or if we could not read the Scriptures. The Scriptures, by themselves, however, are a sufficiently complete expression of apostolic teaching. The Scriptures are, according to Irenaeus, “the ground and pillar of our faith” (3.1.1-2, cf., 1 Tm 3.15).

Secondly, Irenaeus’ argument for Rome and tradition is nested in this larger argument for Scriptural authority against the heretics. His argument from tradition is aimed at a group that says they do not accept the Scriptures, but accepts an oral tradition that teaches doctrines not taught in the Scriptures. Irenaeus raises the ante on tradition – arguing that if you want tradition you can’t do any better than the tradition in the churches founded by the apostles – and then uses that tradition to force the heretics, as it were, to accept the authority of the Scriptures.

Finally, Irenaeus’s argument is that the Roman church is a “preeminent authority” because, up to that time, she has “preserved continuously” the “apostolical tradition.” Remember Irenaeus’s argument: If you heretics want to appeal to tradition instead of the Scriptures, you can’t do any better than appealing to Rome (and the other apostolic churches). Irenaeus’s argument doesn't pertain to asserting tradition as a source of authority against those who accept and appeal to the Scriptures. Indeed, the irony is that affirming an unwritten, oral tradition of doctrines not also affirmed in the Scriptures is what Irenaeus criticizes the heretics for. It seems to me a real inversion of his argument for modern Roman Catholics then to appeal to it as evidence precisely for an unwritten, oral tradition of doctrines that are not taught in the Scriptures.

Irenaeus’s argument begins with the sufficiency of the Scriptures (3.1.1-2) and ends with the sufficiency of the Scriptures (3.5.1). Giving Irenaeus’s argument the most honest reading I am able, it does not establish tradition as an authority with any content distinct from the Scriptures, and it does not establish Rome as any authority independent of her faithfulness to the Scriptures. It seems to me that a reader can tease out an argument for an unwritten tradition that contains doctrines not taught in the Scriptures only by ignoring how Irenaeus's argument about tradition fits in the chiastic arc of his broader argument about the Scriptures.

The Deuteronomy 28/30 Pattern in the Revelation to John

2010-03-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

We’ve spent about a year so far in Sunday School going verse by verse through the Revelation to John. My main interpretive approach has been that we should read the book as we read the other prophetic books: Just as, say, the prophecies of Jeremiah had immediate application to Jeremiah’s day, and thus need to be read “preteristically” in order to be understood properly, so, also, Jeremiah is a book for the ages, to instruct God’s people in all times, and so needs to be read with that end in mind as well.

It is not entirely wrong to characterize the book as being "about" judgment on Israel for killing her king - who is now resurrected and ascended at the right hand of power. That the king she murdered is now resurrected and sitting at the right hand of power means that it is definitely "Oh, oh" time for Israel (Acts 2.36-37). But while not entirely inaccurate, it is not entirely accurate either. The pattern of judgment for Israel is not “merely” Deuteronomy 28. The pattern is instead what I call the Deuteronomy 28/30 pattern – judgment, then repentance and return. The restoration in Dt 30 is absolutely integral to understanding both the purpose and effect of the judgment detailed in Deuteronomy 28. The pattern of judgment, then restoration is integral to the entire witness of the Scriptures, both in God's dealings with corporate entities as well as with individuals (see, e.g., Ro 11.28-32, Heb 12.4-11, & etc.).

In connection with the Revelation to John, we see this pattern as well in the overthrowing of the Harlot-City (which is Jerusalem, Rev 11.8 & etc.). There is, to be sure, a physical quality to this overthrow in the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Roman beast in 70 A.D. (Rev 17.16-18). But the greater defeat for Satan is not the physical annihilation of the Harlot City -- indeed, annihilation would in a sense be ultimate victory for Satan, as the Bride would destroyed, and so she could not be a consort for her Lord (which is why God created her in the first place). Rather, the greater defeat for Satan is the restoration and transformation of the Harlot into the Bride of the Lamb. This is the both/and nature of the Deuteronomy 28/30 pattern.

So here’s the movement that I see in Rev 19: The final defeat of the Harlot is described in vv. 1-4. Then, suggestively, the text immediately shifts in vv. 5-11 to describing the Bride of the Lamb, who is now prepared for the betrothal/wedding ceremony. Verses 12-21 then tell us how the Harlot is transformed into the Bride. (There is, obviously, a huge Hosea theme going on here.)

First, for Israel, while the demonic beast and the false prophet are thrown into the lake of fire, the kings of the land of Israel, that is, those who had received the mark of the beast and worshipped his image (counterfeits of the godly marks on forehead and hand, Rev 13.16, 14.9, cf., Rev 7.3, 9.4, 14.1, Ex 13.9. 16, Ex 28.38, Dt 6.8, 11.18) are “killed with the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse” (Rev 19.21).

So, too, the Gentile nations are slain by the Rider in the same manner: “Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. ‘He will rule them with an iron scepter’” (Rev 19.15).

Now, of course, the “sword that comes out of the mouth of the rider of the horse” is the Word of God. Is 49.1-7 (esp. v. 2, cf. Is 11.4), Eph 6.17, Heb 4.12, Rev 2.12, 16. Acts 2.37, 5.33, 7.54 (cf., Lk 24.32). Of interest also is that the “rod of iron” by which the King disciplines and rules the nations directly (Ps 2.9 and Rev 12.5), and through his people (Rev 2.9), is the Word of God (cf., Mt 28.18-20). Christ's kingship is exercised by the preaching of the word; that is Christ's rulership over the nations.

But we already know that God conquers not merely by killing, but by killing and resurrecting – Ro 6.4, 6, 8, Gal 2.20, Col 2.20, 3.3, 2 Tim 2.11, 2 Co 5.14, 17. This is the Deuteronomy 28/30 pattern for Israel in general, but also for every Christian individually as well.

But back to the message of the Revelation, we would seem to see this restoration worked out in history as well. As the late Richard John Neuhaus observed in the February 2005 issue of “First Things”:

“Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire . . . That was about one tenth of the entire population. About one million were in Palestine, including today’s State of Israel, while those in the diaspora were very much part of the establishment in cities such as Alexandria and Constantinople. . . . Some scholars have noted that, by the fourth or fifth century, there were only a few hundred thousand, at most a million, people who identified themselves as Jews. What happened to the millions of others? The most likely answer, it is suggested, is that they became Christians.”

Judgment, then restoration. The Harlot-City of the “adulterous generation” that Jesus spoke to (Mt 12.39, 16.4) becomes the New Jerusalem of purity and glory. But the glory of the new is greater than mere restoration, for it encompasses both Jew and Gentile (Is 49.6).

A Couple of News Reports about Christians & Muslims in Indonesia & Nigeria

2010-03-08T16:47:00.001-08:00

Indonesia here, and Nigeria here.

ISI American Civics Quiz

2010-03-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

Take the quiz -- if you dare. :-)

I've posted this link before. I think ISI revised parts of the quiz - I recall that some of the questions in the original quiz were poorly worded, and the questions here seemed pretty clear. (Although [insert embarassed cough here], I did score 100% on the original quiz, as well as on this version of the quiz). The question on Keynesianism is still somewhat poorly worded (but I won't say why so I don't spoil the question for you).

The Queen of the Night Aria from the "Magic Flute"

2010-03-03T06:43:00.000-08:00

We've been listening to this quite a bit recently, and have the entire opera on CD to watch this weekend.

Bumper Sticker I Saw Today

2010-03-03T06:41:00.001-08:00

A sort of funny bumper sticker I saw today -- "War never solved anything . . . except for slavery, facism, Nazism, and communism."

My Indifference to C.S. Lewis

2010-02-19T11:11:00.001-08:00

Keith Ghormley got me thinking again about C.S. Lewis.

I'm an unalloyed fan of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustice Scrubbs is a fine, recognizable character.

But, frankly, besides a thumbs up for LWW, I think that the remainder of the Narnia Chronicles are pretty poor fiction. I do respect the end of The Last Battle -- both for offing the Pevensie children at the beginning of the novel, and also for his portrayal of the fully inaugurated eschaton (where everything is brighter and more real than the reality it just replaced, rather than "heavenly," misty, and ethereal). But it's a dull, plodding read for the most part, as are the other books in the series.

And while I like his portrayal of the changing relationship between Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane, through That Hideous Strength, Perelandra is largely just awful.

I first came across Lewis through his theological writings. Everybody was reading The Screwtape Letters (which I've dipped into but have never read entirely), so I picked up his book on the Psalms and some other works that I thought would be serious theology, even if written for a broader lay audience.

I recall being distinctly unimpressed. There was no Biblical difficulty for which Lewis didn't seem to avoid by taking the stupid way out. E.g., the imprectatory Psalms are in the Bible for Lewis to teach us how not to pray. Blah. After reading a bit of this I concluded I just didn't have time to waste on such nonsense. So I've never really gotten his position in the modern evangelical pantheon. But then, perhaps, because I think that most of the folks in the modern evangelical Pantheon are overrated (e.g., Francis Schaeffer), perhaps Lewis does belong there after all.

Hayek vs. Keynes Economic Rap

2010-01-30T13:18:00.000-08:00

Very funny. Here.

The Simpsons on Graduate School

2010-01-27T13:31:00.000-08:00

Very funny. Here.

Hmm. What would I tell potential grad students? First, unless you so love your area that you don't care whether you have a job when you graduate or not, then pay attention to supply and demand. Your love for a subject area is not a reason for a university to give you a job.

Secondly, can you produce new knowledge? Grad school (well, at least doctoral study) is not about studying something really hard. It's about knowing an area well enough that you can make original contributions to the field. I have seen very smart people fail in grad school because they are not intellectually creative. Creativity is a personal quality that is distinct from intelligence. The older I get the more I recognize the critical importance of scientific or scholarly creativity for successful scholarship.

Luther's Small Catechism in Graphic-Novel Form

2010-01-26T18:57:00.000-08:00

You gotta love this. I immediately ordered one for Jack.

My Favorite Political Argument in Film

2010-01-22T06:40:00.000-08:00

Here.

CD of Lutheran Chant

2010-01-17T16:18:00.000-08:00

This is really great recording of Lutheran chant. It's a recording of the Daily Prayers (Matins, Vespers, Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline) from the Lutheran Service Book. It costs only $9.99 and can be ordered here. For a sample you can download the Matins te Deum here (although I'm not fond of the organ accompaniment -- but most of the chanting on the recording is a capella).

As I mentioned, the music and text for all of these services is in the Lutheran Service Book. This is the "hymn book" for Lutherans, but more. It includes the Psalter, as well as liturgical settings for the Divine Service, for the Daily Prayers, and services for special occasions. Also included in the recording it the Litany. But the music for the Litany is in the Altar Book and not in the LSB.

A Couple of Facts about the LCMS

2010-01-16T13:05:00.000-08:00

The Lutheran Witness published something of a fact sheet on the LCMS in the January issue. One is that average weekly attendance is 155.2. The other is the average annual communicant contribution is $744.55. Multiplying those two figures means that the budget for the "average" LCMS church is a little over $115,000 per year.

Relief for Haiti

2010-01-14T07:59:00.000-08:00

Here are two trusted organizations that are providing relief for Haiti. LCMS World Relief, and Food for the Poor.

Blogging while in Flight

2010-01-07T12:20:00.001-08:00

Well, my last refuge from the office is disappearing. One reason I haven't minded flying as much as I do is that it gets me away from all of the electronic demands of the office. But today as I was getting on the plane, I noticed that it was one of American's new WiFi ready planes. So I'm blogging while in flight.

I probably won't get connected everytime I fly, but it was sort of nice not to have the opportunity before -- a great excuse to get away from e-mail for a while.

Ah, well.

Funny Math Joke - Spinal Tap's "These Go to Eleven"

2010-01-04T18:24:00.001-08:00

The joke here is confusing an ordinal measure for a cardinal measure. It's very funny. I use it at the beginning of my methods classes to motivate the difference between a cardinal and an ordinal measure (not that students confuse them all that often).

One more thing about "Avatar"

2010-01-01T08:05:00.001-08:00

One more thing about "Avatar": An ex-Marine corporal like Jake Sully would know that you don't make a frontal assault against machine guns if your forces are on horseback (even if they are alien horses) and have only bows and arrows. Even my son knew that the Na'vi at least should have attempted to flank the company's forces rather than attack them headon.