UPDATE COMMENT: OK, I downloaded and reinstalled quicktime and I still can view nothing, including flash games. I have no idea what to do.
My iBook downloaded an update of quicktime and now none of my browsers show video anymore. I get just a picture of a faded q icon and a question mark. Even Safari does this for me, which makes no sense at all.
Poverty and politics. I think this applies to health care to. The only way to make it better is to make people richer.
So I’m working at the dinner table since the soul of my iMac is somewhere lose in the ether and its body is sitting motionless at my real desk. I’m working on my laptop yesterday morning and the girl pictured left crawls up into the chair beside me in her pajamas and starts playing with the piece of the power cord that plugs into the wall when you don’t want a longer cord and a three-prong and with an ear-mouth piece that plugs into a phone to make it hands free.
Her whispering doesn’t register in my mind. I leave the table to do something and return, realizing I need to make sure she gets dressed. So I tell her it is time to use the potty.
She looks at the hardware in front of her and says to them, “I’ll be right back.”
Although the violence appears to be more anarchic than concerted, it has had the same effect as an organized campaign to destroy Iraq’s Assyrians. Virtually every member of the community is under siege….
Christian women are particularly vulnerable. BetBasoo writes: “Often incidents do not end with the prisoner’s release. In one case in Baghdad, the victim committed suicide after the ransom was paid and she went home, because of the torture and sexual violence she suffered. In another case, a young woman talked to her family by phone and told them: ‘I’m dead,’ referring to being gang-raped. She eventually committed suicide whilst still in the hands of her tormentors.”
Can we even say for sure that this is a spoof?
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://youtube.com/v/j9pPZs4aTcU” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]
Therefore Synod rejects the errors of those… who deny that Christ earned acceptance with God (#4) If theology proper matters at all, this is worse than anything Trent formulated. We’re supposed to reject “FV” on the authority of people who produce this sort of lunacy?
Claiming that imputation is based on legal union may sound rhetorically convincing, but it logically boils down to saying that imputation is based on a relationship in which it is right and appropriate that the status of one person, whether righteous or sinful, is imputed to another. “And what is the nature of that union?” Well, it is a union that involves imputation!
The entire statement is incredibly narrow and circular.
Keep in mind that imputation is supposed to actually explain something–how a holy God can justly grant pardon to sinners and accept them as righteous in his sight. Even people who think they are simply expounding what the Bible says, usually spend a great deal of time setting up a theodicy-dillemma: If God is altogether perfect then how can he overlook sin? The whole point is to appeal to justice to show that God must not forgive arbitrarily.
Imputation is supposed to answer this dilemma. But claiming that God simply counts one person’s obedience, suffering, and death as the fulfillment of the his righteous requirements of a multitude of sinners, is just as arbitrary and unjust. If God can just pretend that we are righteous with Christ’s righteousness (if imputation is just God doing math in his head) then how is that not just as arbitrary and unjust as simply forgiving them in the first place, without demanding anything from Jesus or anyone else to provide a “basis” for it? Imputaton, rather than explaining the basis, becomes a way of saying no basis is necessary.
Of course, if this was what the Bible presented to us, we would be required to accept it. We would be required to be satisfied with this answer and simply admit that it does not appear adequate to many people, including those who try to justify the doctrine as a vindication of how God can justly forgive sinners.
But in fact, the Reformation never taught this version of imputation. Both in the case of Adam and in the case of Christ, imputation was grounded in union. This eventually got obscured in some nominalistic strains of the Reformed Tradition so that the traditional view had to be defended in the nineteenth century.
Whether or not this settles all arguments with possible accusations against God’s justice is impossible to say. What I do know is that it is what the Bible teaches, as is witnessed by the Reformed heritage, and thus it is the final word God has given in his own defense of his just, gracious, and non-arbitrary character. If He is satisfied with it than Christians should be satisfied with it as well.
We are conceived as sinners because we all come from Adam and are born in Adam by an organic unity. We receive the imputed righteousness of Christ by faith because we receive Christ by faith and, being clothed in Christ, are clothed in his righteousness.
All nominalistic versions if imputation whereby it becomes a mental operation in God’s mind will lead to hypercalvinism and (since we tend to image the god we worship) unconfessional definitions of “faith” which make it nothing more than a convert doing math in his head.
The Reformed Faith is richer than this, more Biblical than this; and if that were not so, then it would be a minor deviancy in Christian history rather than a true apostolic witness in the power of the Holy Spirit.
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