Early in the book of Joshua we are given the rather amazing information that the Israelites ceased practicing circumcision in the wilderness. A whole generation of people were participating in the Tabernacle worship and sacrificial system who had not been circumcised.

Another interesting detail is that there is no sign of the mixed multitude of Egyptians that accompanied Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness.

So what happened? The most obvious solution to me is that they simply got merged into the twelve tribes. After all, there was increasingly little distinction between them as they progressed through the wilderness. Neither were circumcised; and then everyone was circumcised when they entered the Land.

spoiler

The real philosopher Rousseau, if memory serves, forced his lover to give up their children to an orphanage (a likely death sentence).

I think Rousseau and Locke are meant to be opposites of the ones whose names they share. The TV show’s Locke is no empiricist at all. And Rousseau is only a loner because of fear, not because of anything good to say about nature. She is insane with grief because her child was taken from her.

Well, between congregational recordings and the iTunes new online ordering service I am now completly caught up with Lost.

possible spoiler

I love the show. It is hard to know where to begin.

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic thing to say is that the beach scenes take me back to my high school years on Kwajalein, Marshall Islands. There is something about the surf on the Pacific Ocean in the tropics that I find quite blissful.

Another personal attraction is the character John Locke because he is played by Terry O’Quinn. Perhaps you remember his cameo in the X-files movie as the agent who killed himself to blow up the building at the beginning of the movie. I remember him from the ill-fated Millennium, Chris Carter’s attempt at new and different TV work. In that show, O’Quinn played Peter Watts, friend to profiler Frank Black and member of the mysterious Millennium Group which posed as a security consulting firm but was actually more like a superstitious (and magical?) cult. Watts’ relationship to the Group and his weird view of the world is quite a bit like that of John Locke’s. I almost want to say that he is there playing the “same” character even thought there histories are nothing alike.

My biggest problem with the series is the way Jack has kept a buzz cut. Can that be done without electricity?

At this point I’m thinking there must be three groups on the island:

1. The plane survivors, which were two groups but will hopefully merge.
2. The weird scientific group that built the underground station (were the newly intruduced survivors hiding out in the remains of another station? I wasn’t happy that no one asked.)
3. “The others.”

Of course, just as we’ve seen in the encounter betwee the raft crew and the second group of plane survivors, these groups could be divided up to cause more confusion. And there will always be the question of whether the island is somehow attracting/causing this weirdness, rather than the weirdness explaining anything…

Rich Lusk has written an essay defending Calvin’s “four-office” view of the Church: Ministers, Teachers, Elders, Deacons. Some day I hope to have time and provide an html version on Theologia.

However, that day is far away as far as I can tell. If you can read adobe acrobat then you can download Rich’s article here.

You can start from this blog entry.

Expulsion from Loretto
As of Saturday, October 29th, I was given official notice by express mail that I am expelled from Loretto High School. This was given completely without forewarning, without a meeting, and without a chance to say goodbye. My family is now seeking legal advice, and more details will follow.
posted by KT4JC @ 6:37 PM

Happy hunting.

I’m as die-hard a capitalist as anyone, but doesn’t this video make you queasy? At the very least, it demonstrates to me that the primary different between PBS and for-profit network programming is the amount of sheer hypocrisy in the former.

Not for profit. Right.

This was better than any generation of Star Trek or the last three “first three” episodes of Star Wars. Even though it was space opera it had a more “futuristic” feel (in the speculative predictive sense) than the Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica storylines. To me this made it more interesting.

The Western theme got way muted in the movie from the way it made the TV series so interesting.

I might write more later if I have time.

Here is a great quotation which I reproduce in full:

When a theologian assumes the standpoint of an ecclesiastical creed, and then proceeds, with a polemic air, to search for single texts of Scripture favorable to himself or unfavorable to his opponent, he is more than likely to overdo the matter. His creed may be as true as the Bible itself; but his method is reprehensible…Read the polemic literature of the Antinomian, the Calvinistic, and the Sacramental controversies. The whole Bible is ransacked and treated as if it were an atomical collection of dogmatic proof-texts. (Milton Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics, pg. 172)

Some Calvinists deny that God genuinely and sincerely desires the salvation of all men. They reject John Murray and Robert Dabney on the issue. Gary North, in his book Common Grace & Dominion, wants to make a decisive distinction between God’s “favor” and “favors”-only allowing the latter to the reprobate. Herman Hoeksema maintains the same sort of division. In his self-interrogating catechism he writes:

9. Is it then, not also true, that in these things of this present life both the godly and ungodly receive tokens of God’s favor toward them?

By no means; for, as it must be evident both from Scripture and experience that the evil things of this present life, such as sickness, pain, sorrow, adversity, poverty, yea, even death, are not sent to the godly in God’s wrath and to curse them; so it must be evident that the good things of this present life; are not sent to the wicked in God’s favor and to bless them. We must not confuse grace and things.

10. In what light, then, must we consider the things which in this life the godly and ungodly have in common, in order correctly to evaluate them and understand their significance?

In the light of eternity. All the things of the present life are but means to an eternal end. As they are received by us and employed by us as rational-moral creatures they all bear fruit, either to eternal life and glory, or to eternal death and desolation. If they tend to life they are bestowed on us in the grace of God and are a blessing, no matter whether they are in health or sickness, prosperity or adversity, life or death, for all things work together for good to them that love God; if they tend to death and damnation they are bestowed on us in God’s wrath and are a curse, even though our eyes stand out with fatness and we bathe in luxury.

Murray simply does not accept this sort of reasoning. He makes a distinction, using traditional dogmatic terminology between different sorts of ways in which God wills:

It is not to be forgotten that when it is said that God absolutely and universally takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, we are not here speaking of God’s decretive will. In terms of his decretive will it must be said that God absolutely decrees the eternal death of some wicked and, in that sense, is absolutely pleased so to decree. But in the text it is the will of God’s benevolence (voluntas eurastias) that is stated, not the will of God’s decree (voluntas eudokias). It is, in our judgment, quite unjustifiable to think that in this passage there is any reflection upon the decretive will of God . . .

Thus, it is simply wrong to insist that the end to which a thing (sunshine, rain, a presentation of the Gospel, etc.) will lead according to God’s immutable and infallible plan is the only consideration one should weigh in deciding whether it is a “favor” or represent’s God’s attitude of “favor.” To use different terminology, Murray is rejecting an exclusively teleological approach to understanding God’s actions. Is this rejection warranted?

Yes, because an exclusively teleological approach would lead one to accuse God of hating His creatures without cause. This is the case because reprobation has occurred apart from depravity on the part of those who were reprobate. For instance, when the Devil and his angels first fell, they fell from grace. Their punishment was and will be determined in part by how much they had received from God, for which they were not properly grateful. Furthermore, God gave many favors to Adam and Eve–for all of which they were held accountable. Every good and perfect gift which God gave to Adam and Eve only added to the perversity of their sin. Unless one denies that, “from everyone who has been given much shall much be required,” is a universal principle, one simply cannot deny that all the favors shown to Satan, Adam, and Eve simply magnified the seriousness of their sin and the severity of their condemnation.

But does this fact mean that God did not love Adam and Eve? Were Adam and Eve, knowing that it was possible that they might Fall, supposed to infer that God might not love them? Were they supposed to wonder about all the good things they had been given by God–to worry that maybe God was “setting them up”? To ask such questions is to answer them. God unambiguously revealed His love for Adam and Eve in all the blessings which He lavished upon them. To claim otherwise is to take sides with the Serpent who ascribed horrible and underhanded motives to God.

Of course, it is hard to understand how God could love a creature and predestine his sin. But this is simply a problem that theists are going to have to live with. Anyone who admits that God knows the future, even if he rejects foreordination, is going to have problems understanding how God maintains a genuinely loving relationship with his ethical creatures. If God knows that John Smith will reject the Gospel, and yet brings it about that John Smith is offered the Gospel, isn’t God merely guilty of entrapment? Likewise, if God knows that every privilege and blessing He gives to Satan, Adam, and Eve will be eventually rejected and exacerbate their sin, then isn’t God enticing them into a greater rebellion? How can He possibly view His gifts to such creatures to be “good” for them when He knows evil will result?

It is hard to quite get one’s mind around this problem, but the answer has to be that God’s blessings are blessings apart from the ends to which they lead. Grace is grace, even if it leads to reprobation. God’s offer is sincere, and His mercy–even His non-saving mercy–is genuine. The Bible speaks both of sincere offers and certain reprobation. The Bible, it seems, does not deny the reality of teleology in God’s plan, but it does not allow teleology to exhaustively explain God’s feelings toward people, or our interpretation of his gracious acts of providence.

excerpt from here