Looks like God has kept open a window of opportunity for establishing a Church in the Minneapolis area. Someone needs to go through it before it closes.

Here’s the story.

Hat Tip: Chris

Rick Phillips posts a great quotation from Schaff on Roman Catholicism. While it may seem simplistic, it think it is quite reasonable to see Trent as the birth of a new church–moreso than anything resulting from the Reformation. Reading this post from Rick reminds me of Peter Leithart’s excellent review of The Principle of Protestantism

Schaff is an excellent writer especially for Evangelicals who might be tempted to defect from Reformation denominations.

Might as well state the obvious.

Critiques of N. T. Wright in Evangelical Reformed circles are not critiques of the bishop of Durham. They are attacks on fellow pastors in good standing as “aberrant” “miscreants.” They take place on email lists where membership is regularly purged so as to weed out those that might disagree and forge (I do mean forge) a consensus, or on church websites against pastors who never find out until they ego-surf for themselves. No charges or ever filed; no direct interaction ever takes place. One finds out months, perhaps a year later that cds of lectures one never knew about have been circulating ascribing to you positions that you abominate.

This is the world we live in right now. Criticisms of N. T. Wright are invariably transitive, besmirching someone besides the defender of the resurrection and the deity of the historical Jesus. Appreciation for him has nothing to do with why one would try to occasionally deal with the flood of misinformation about Wright. It is pure self-defense in an uncivil war.

I agree with Paul to claim to refute the “Dunn-Sanders school” as the teaching that the whole nation of Israel would be saved rather than a remnant makes no sense at all of Dunn.

See this quotation where Dunn’s majore point is to point this out to Sanders.

“Who are my mother and my brothers?”
The Gospels don’t preach family values.

Hat Tip: Michael Spencer @ BHT

Years ago in what amounts to another life, I got to meet and occasionally hire Doug Bandow as a freelance writer for some of the publications Coral Ridge Ministries then produced. I was shocked to learn through Scott Cunningham that he lost his position at the Cato Institute because of he had, at one time, received money from Abramoff for editorials he wrote.

While I think it might be good for there to be some sort of guild that develops principles for editorializers, I don’t think Bandow’s integrity should be questioned. As Thomas DiLorenzo wrote on the Lew Rockwell blog:

Let’s try to put this thing into perspective. The Left, which includes Business Week, the AP, and other “mainstream” news outlets, is going overboardin reporting/gloating about this. This includes Paul Krugman in the NY Times. Bandow has admitted writing a few columns for a lobbyist who paid him a few thousand dollars. By comparison, there are literally thousands of statist-oriented nonprofit “advocacy” organizations that collect BILLIONS ANNUALLY in government grants. Much of it is used to write op-eds, books, reports, etc. to promote the agendaof the government agency that made the grants. This includes nearly every college and university in America. These Think Tanks for Statism receive BILLIONS ANNUALLY as well.

This is not to say that two wrongs make a right, but that if there isa problem with biased research in the public policy arena it is with all the government-funded statist academic researchers like Paul Krugman and his nonprofit sector political allies. Comparing the Statist Establishment in this regard to Doug Bandow is like comparing a gnat to an elephant.

(Sidenote: will someone please train Rockwell bloggers in html markup and ban caps?)

At this point, I am doubtful that there are two wrongs here. But even if there are, I can’t help but sympathize with someone who could be making a lot more money working for the other side but who takes an opportunity to write about what he already believes anyway.

For what it is worth, here is Doug’s take on the issue.

My only regret in all this is that I never stayed in touch with him. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always found him to be admirable.

Giving our differing theological commitments, our mutual admiration of John Williamson Nevin never motivated me to by Wentz’s book on Nevin. But, in writing my reiew of Hart’s study of Nevin, I had reason to glance at the Amazon page and found a stellar review written by a PCA Pastor who got impatient waiting for Hart’s book. His last words must be remembered:

If Wentz’s conclusion does not get you to buy either his book or the Hart one you have no soul: “The worship of American churches is found wanting because it gives no evidence of the sacramental character of the mystical presence of Christ. It focuses instead on private experience, private judgment, and bibliocism. The radical catholicity of the Incarnation is sacramental and liturgical……… the heart of that challenge [against American religious thought of his day] beats with concern for the community of faith, for the body that represents the presence of a new creation in the midst of the old.”

Great stuff.

Halo is not the “best” game out there, at least for those using their PCs or Macs. Unreal Tournament and Battlefield 1942 both come to mind, and I’m sure there are many others. American Army and Castle Wittgenstein: Enemy Territory are both free multiplayers that are high quality. But I found myself more and more playing the Halo demo’s single capture-the-flag map rather than any of these others.

Halo is made by Bungie and has the look and feel of the old Half-Life game. The most distinctive shared trait, to my mind, is that if you are inactive for awhile your alter ego’s hands fiddle with the weapon–tighten the screws on the pistol or double-check the scope on the sniper rifle or just impatiently slap the grip on the pump-action shotgun. It looks decent and the environments are somewhat interesting, but there are better graphics in many of the new games.

What Halo does in a way that no one else does is gravity, momentum, and bounce. You simply haven’t lived until you surprise the warthog (jeep) that is about to run you down by switching from a pistol to a rocket launcher and watching it tumble end over end over your head from the blast. Even getting shot down is entertaining since the point of view switches from first-person to third- and you get to see yourself fly into the air.

Apparently the Xbox version is different, but on multiplayer using the Mac, multiplayer Halo is entirely lacking in any blood or gore. Much of the single-player game is the same way. Occasionally you notice a flash of purple when you shoot an alien, but that is it. The main reason one shouldn’t let one’s children play multiplayer (aside from the usual point that they are better off doing something else) is that you can often run into the use of abominable language on the part of the other players (you can often avoid it if you try in the full game; the demo is infested with bozos).

[The single-player game, however, suddenly turns into a horror out of the alien movies mid way through the adventure and becomes a great deal more gory. Fair warning. But the multiplayer stays sanitized throughout.]

By the way, if you download the demo and find you can only play with a few players before getting overwhelmed with lag, for what its worth, I stopped having any problems when I started using the full game. I could play with the maximum sixteen players, something that was impossible for me on the demo.

Halo works as a cross between a sci-fi game like Starsiege Tribes and a contemporary military game. In the singleplayer game your alterego is a bioengineered cyborg in full body armor (which explains why you survive while your fellow marines tend to die off). Thus, in the multiplayer, everyone has full armor (eliminating the crude character culture present in Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena) and force fields. But many of your weapons (machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher) and vehicles (jeep and tank) are recognizable. Knowing that your character is more or less a superhero helps make the multiplayer more understandable. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand why many of the weapons seem so lacking in the power to kill. It takes more than a clip of ammo from a machine gun to get through the shield of an enemy and actually do real damage. The problem is simple: everyone is a superhero in multiplayer. You are all playing some version of the unique Halo protagonist.

It turns out that other weapons are actually more valuable when they are used right. The rocket launcher is obvious, but once you learn that the pistol has a 2x telescopic sight and that the game tracks whether or not you aim for the head, all sorts of new possibilities are opened up for you. In fact, grabbing a big weapon often leaves you overconfident and vulnerable, especially if you are taken by surprise.

On Xbox you can play an alien in multiplayer, I have heard, but that option is not available on the computer. I don’t miss that since you do get to use the alien weaponry. It is lying around the various maps. What makes this stuff interesting is that some of the projectiles (energy or exploding needles) track their target. Personally, I love the needler. It requires no great skill in aiming and, if you get the whole clip embedded in your opponant, it is the equivalent of a direct grenade hit. It works great on vehicles unless they are speeding away.

There are several different games, though the only ones I find interesting at this point are capture the flag and team slayer. I simply have no taste for every-man-for-himself games. In general, capture the flag is easier to play since dying can serve the interests of the team. Slayer is won by sheer number of kills which means, if you don’t inflict more than you suffer you’re dragging down your team.

The vehicles in halo are a great deal of fun. If you jump in the gun or driver’s seat you your viewpoint switches to third-person, giving you a great deal more entertainment. Weirdly, in the multiplayer the vehicles do not take damage. When you shoot them you only shoot the player. This allows you to take the vehicles but it leaves you with a rather strange vulnerability even when you are driving a full fledged tank. Instead of being armored you simply make a bigger target. The alien vehicles are much more fun since that allows you to use antigravity. Ther is both a single flyer and a hovercraft that your ride like a motorcycle. It is like fighting with stormtroopers on the Ewok planet.

Granted, none of this is as healthy as paintball. But you couldn’t dive bomb from a Banshee in paintball either. Halo is a great deal of fun for anyone who likes computer games. My iMac sometimes freezes and has to be restarted, but for the most part it has no problems playing the game. I have no idea what the PC requirements are.

That’s Chris’ practical suggestion in response to this cry of anguish.

I hate to be shallow about all this, but I’m just happy to learn what would be one of my favorite poems if the meter for the third line wasn’t off:

There’ll always be a happy hour
For those with money, jobs and power.
They’ll never realize the hurt,
They cause to men they treat like dirt.

I think “understand” instead of “realize” might fix it. Also, I’d like to use a less-gender-implicating “those” in line four.