Monthly Archives: February 2007

Peter Leithart responds

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On Vulgar Language

No pastor has ever been accused of hording smut because he owned a dictionary. Peter’s blog entries do not remotely justify the accusations made against him.

But there is no reason for me to belabor the point since every mature reader or every reader who is not desperately looking for a stone to throw has any doubt about this.

Peter, for the record, is one of the gentlest people I know, and his children are exemplary. The implications being made about his piety and his children on the basis of less than 1/500th of his blog are inexcusable. Any one who knows him knows his speech is God-honoring. For example, I’ve never known him to go all psychotic about people he disagrees with and make up asinine excuses to slur their character. And, on a much less important issue, I’ve never heard him swear in anger (or at any other time).

Peter is an amazing author, writing in a host of different genres from children’s stories, literary guides, theological works, and Biblical surveys and commentaries. He is a national treasure and his presence enriches the Protestant and especially (though not exclusively) the presbyterian world. My wife and I used to actually contract with him for freelance work for Coral Ridge Ministries when we worked there as editorial associates. We can attest he is also very much a professional.

Yesterday, during communion

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Me: Can God forgive sinners like us?

Calvin and Nevin: Of course?

Me: It’s a lot easier to believe that when He serves us wine isn’t it?

Calvin: Yes!

Nevin: Except that wine tastes bad. Yuck.

Me: Calvin, why are you moving away. Do you think Nevin’s going to be struck by lightning?

Calvin: (nods)

Then we all start laughing.

The trap of easy wage earning

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Regarding my regrets expressed here, I forgot to mention a major reason that held me back: I could make a living as a wage slave. Between my wife and I, it was fairly easy to live on hourly jobs that didn’t require experience.  (Actually, before children, Jennifer had a professional job in publishing.)
After seminary, with two children and another on the way, life was completely different. A history of working hard simply didn’t mean enough for my new economic situation.

So my advice to the young: work hard but work smart. You need your hourly rate to be a lot higher in a few years.

New business

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scrollandquill.gifI’m having second thoughts about having a business blog. I think I’d rather simply refashion this one somewhat. In any case, I’m doing everything at once as I transition into the bivocational world. I already have a project and am working on getting another one under way. It is one of those “Don’t look down; keep climbing” periods in my life.

Among other things I haven’t done yet involves spelling out services and, as best is possible, rates. So far, I know I’ll be offering manuscript review (my wife has actually had a small business called the Write Review, so this is easy), ghost-writing, manuscript creation out of other materials (notes, audio, etc–this was basically one of my main duties as an assistant pastor last year), and illustrations (though a contact).

I can’t say that this isn’t tainted with some regret. Starting a business like this at my age to support a family of six is doable, I think. And, I’ve done this enough times (both before and during the pastorate) to have a reputation enough to hope to compete with the single college student who can underbid me in hourly rate (you get what you pay for and all that). But I’m now looking back on life and realizing I could have really capitalized on work I did and built up an even better rep by offering services at a lower rate. Back before Jennifer and I had children and when we both worked, I could have afforded to really offer some skills (though I’ve improved since then) at a lower rate. Maybe our time in seminary could have been done more easily when it was time to go….

Sadly, I really didn’t “get it.” At the time. Generating a business simply did not occur to me. I tried to 1) simply get steady work and 2) get rich from some great book I would write (Why didn’t that intimidate me? I couldn’t tell you.). I had a lot of connections and I realize now that I didn’t utilize them. If anything, I expected them to bring opportunities to me. Youth is wasted on the young.

But I’m not too worried about it now. I was reading John Calvin’s 1536 Institutes this morning before church and came accross this piece of wisdom:

…even while we walk in the Lord’s ways by the leading of the Holy Spirit, to keep us from forgetting ourselves and becoming puffed up, something imperfect remains in us to give us occasion for humility, to stop every mouth before God and to teach us always to shift all trust from ourselves to him…

For some unaccountable reason it has become scandalous to some Presbyterians to point out that good works are necessary in believers as means of obtaining final salvation. But the full truth is even more scandalous: our sins are also means of our salvation.

Paul is quite clear about this. When he writes that

in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

there are two things to remember. First, Paul certainly includes our own sin in this list. Second, Paul is not merely saying that we stay in the love of Christ despite these things. The phrase could bear that meaning but the context militates against it. We remain in Christ’s love through these things. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

All things. Even our sins are means to bring us to glory. This was Paul’s message. It would be easy to see how someone might think Paul was encouraging sin. In fact he was accused of preaching “why not do evil that good may come?”

So paradoxically, even though I can see when I might have done things differently and had an advantage, I have to believe this is the right time.

Just to give you an idea of what I’m trying to do, here are a few agencies I found on the web:

More later

Who said this?

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Therefore, in the communion of saints, our sins are continually forgiven us by the ministry of he church itself when the priests or bishops to whom this office has been committed strengthen godly consciences by the gospel promises in the hope of pardon and forgiveness. This they do both publicly and privately as need requires. For many on account of their weakness need personal consolation.

(answer)

More Church/web 2.0 discussion

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Since I’ve been linking distinctively Christian social networking sites perhaps it would be good to show you a few discussions. cms.gifThe first I’ll mention is a blog entry from the interestingly-named site, “Church Marketing Sucks.” I really liked this entry because I thought I was the victim of confusion. I couldn’t figure out is web 2.0 applied to social networking or to application services that are remote (i.e. not a program on your hard drive, but one you can use through the interent). Well, I was confused because the term is confused. It seems to mean both:

For my purposes, web 2.0 refers to the kinds of sites that build on community or offer a service. Rather than simply offering static information, web 2.0 sites offer interaction.

See? The interaction can be between people or users and programs.

Let me just break in at this point (I want to talk about social networking, of course) and list a few of my own current favorites. First, some background for those who don’t know: I have two computers a laptop, and a desktop, which I use about equally. Both are normally connected to the internet by broadband. What this means is that I used to have a continual headache trying to synchronize them with email and calendar etc. My first and primary reason for searching for web applications was to eliminate the need to worry about this. So…

  • Gmail — this is an outstanding service. It even allows free POP3 integration if you want to use your own email client. I guess I should experiment with that feature in order to download email when I know I won’t have a web connection. But the interface through a browser is quite good. (If you won a Mac, then I would recommend Firefox rather than Safari, unless there have been some updates since I switched browsers.)
  • Google Reader — This is still officially “in the lab” but it works quite well. This is a case where a function wasn’t working for me on my browsers and using it on the web was a great help. I tried to use the “live bookmark” feature on firefox (version 1) and had so many feeds it seemed to be making the browser useless for the first five minutes after starting it. (Anyone else have this problem?) Switching to the reader made life much less frustrating. There are other readers out there. I couldn’t tell you which one is best because I didn’t feel any great need to move from google’s. I’m just a pawn of the evil empire…, unless that is WalMart… Or is it Microsoft? I get so confused!
  • 30 boxes — a calendar program designed by a fan of Getting Things Done. I suppose there are other good calendars out there, like google’s, but I get superstitious about Google knowing every thing it is possible to know about me (yeah, like they have time to worry about such trivialities) so I diversified. 30 boxes also gives you a todo list as well as a place for shortcuts on an imitation Mac OSX destktop screen in your browser.
  • Tasktoy — another GTD-inspired site is my current start page. It allows you to send reminders to yourself of your tasks, and it allows you to put in your most important links.
  • Zexer address book — I can’t check my gmail address book while composing, so I’ve begun using this site so I can have important addresses available in a window.
  • Google Notebook — I find this easy to use and much more easy to track than, say, using textfiles on my computer. And it is instantly available to any computer I use!
  • Calculator.com — I, frankly, hate using my mac dashboard. It paralyzes my computer for at least a couple of minutes. So reaching my calculator presents a challenge. It is usually a lot easier and faster to go to this website.
  • Time-tracker — This is an indispensable tool for me now that I’ve found it. You can track days or projects as you wish (and you can do both simultaneously if you want). You don’t have to stay on the site for the timer to work.

I have a few more, but this digression is already too long. In any case, after offering his own examples (which involve more social networking than I just offered) “chief blogger” Kevin Hendricks writes:

The church is essentially a community, so the ideals of web 2.0 thinking fit nicely in the context of the church.

He’s absolutely right. Connect Our People has more of a congregation focus than the others that are springing up (as far as I can tell at the moment), which I think is good when the goal is building congregational or denominational community. But the point remains true.

Also this:

Do you see where this is going? Suddenly you don’t have an overworked communications team doing all the updates. You have youth group members maintaining an online events calendar. You have a Sunday School teacher posting lesson notes on a blog and the learning suddenly happens outside of the classroom. You have older members of the congregation sharing their wisdom with younger members. You have people sharing and people connecting. Suddenly it’s not the pastor trying to do everything.

There are some links to follow that are well worth reading, with discrimination. I’m not all that happy with the strong anti-hierarchical message that seems to come out in some 2.0 discussion. It makes me glad that ConnectOurPeople is aimed at churches rather than individuals (though it certianly provides networking for those individuals).

However, it is still pretty interesting to see what sorts of tools are becoming available in response to real needs.

Is it legalism to tell Christians they must obey God?

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Scott Clark writes:

Some folk are telling you that, “there are two parts to every covenant, and if you don’t do your part, you’ll fall away just like those folk in Hebrews and all those Israelites.”

As with most errors, this warning is partly true. It’s true that there are two parts to every covenant. It’s true that some of the Israelites did not enter into the promised land. It’s true that some folk in the visible church fall away, but it’s not true that they fell away because they failed “to do their part.” That would be true if we were in a covenant of works, but we’re not. We’re in a covenant of grace.

I might discuss the exegesis which follows these claims because I disagree with Dr. Clark. However, disagreement does not concern me here as much as what seems to me to be a completely false claim on his part that he represents “the Reformed Faith” and is dealing with those who are outside that faith.

When Francis Turretin asked, “Are good works necessary to salvation?” he answered that they were necessary, not as meritorious causes of our salvation but “as means.” Good works “should be considered necessary to the obtainment of” salvation, “so that no one can be saved without them” (see here for context and references).

In explaining himself he included the following argument:

And as to the covenant, everyone knows that it consists of two parts: on the one hand the promise on the part of God; on the other the stipulation of obedience on the part of man. For as God promises in it to be our God, he wishes that we also in turn should be his people. And as that promise includes every blessing of God, so the obligation denotes the duties of all kinds owed by man to God (as was seen when we treated of the clauses of the covenant). Although God by his special grace wishes these duties of man to be his blessings (which he carries out in them), still the believer does not cease to be bound to observe it, if he wishes to be a partaker of the blessings of the covenant (Institutes, 17.3.7; emphasis added).

As you can see from some interaction between Clark and myself, he thinks he can make good on this in a couple of ways.  One involves claiming everything would be answered if I would only read his book and the other a side-step to the “internal/external” distinction.  The first of these responses is dishonorable.  The second is simply irrelevant (even if it were true that I deny the distinction).  The bottom line is that Clark has preached that no Christian is obligated to obey God as their part in the Covenant of grace and that means he has set his face against the Reformed tradition.

More power to him, if he wants to use his Bible (though the evidence is slim I want to hope for the best).  But the revisionism is intellectually and academically inexcusable.  The fact that he uses such fictions to bash other Reformed ministers and falsely accuse them in the most extreme language would be an offense that could get him fired from any church or institution that cared about Christian ethics (so I assume he is pretty safe where he is).

People can disagree with Turretin and still be Reformed.  They can’t accuse him of being a soteriolgical heretic and claim to be in the same heritage as him.  This is my version of Doug Wilson’s statement,

Note, the point is not that Calvin is right and these men are wrong. Their revivalistic version of the Reformed faith might be the Reformed faith come into its own. They could be right on all points, but if they want to consider themselves Reformed, they can’t be saying that they are “Calvinists except for those parts where Calvin is always denying the gospel.”

But that is exactly what is being said.