Monthly Archives: November 2009

Diagnosing the modern model; Dr. Peter Leithart

It seems to me that there is a model of reality prevalent in the way we think  The model involves minds controlling mechanisms that happen to be bodies.  One’s mind is the person sitting at the computer controlling the shooter in the video game with a mouse aiming a gun and fingers on w, a, s, d to control movement.  One’s mind is the person holding the controller flying the radio controlled plane.

I remember movies in biology class in which the brain was illustrated as a cartoon man in a lab coat watching on a screen what the eyes of the body can see and receiving messages from the other receptors (senses).  We’re all little people driving robots according to this model.

And language is explained in a similar model.  There is a chart of equations somewhere which has certain sounds lined up with certain meaning so that the brain is constantly looking at the chart to match the perceptions with meanings.

In how many ways has this baseless model for human nature contaminated Christian teaching?

Sacraments come to mind.  The role of ceremonies for good or ill more generally would also be affected.  The importance of community, the Church, and the role of human relationships.  For on this model the primary reality is complete isolation.

One of the people, perhaps the most important person, who has begun to make me begin to see this is Dr. Peter Leithart.  Perhaps the best place to see him tackle the problem most directly is in his little book, Against Christianity, but I started back with his The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church, which is very good despite being dated.  The Baptized Body is also quite relevant.  There are many other books he has written that are also very valuable.  I’m sorry to say I haven’t been able to keep up with all of them.

Of course, quite appropriately, Peter (sorry, I can’t continue to refer to him by his last name) is not just about ideas.  His writings encompass literature, exegesis, Bible commentaries, and also fiction.  Anyone who knows him and his family knows they have a great teacher, even if he was to never speak, as to what it means to be a godly husband or father.

Dr. Leithart is a great gift to the Church.  I’m thankful I have had the privilege of encountering him.  Just felt I should mention that right now.  May God never forget him.

Back to work.

(And, yeah, this post did kind of change directions.  Sorry.)

POSTSCRIPT: Many of Peter’s books are free online

Thinking fondly of James Graham right now

KidnappedSo I’m reading Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (Puffin Classics). And it occurs to me that Robert Louis Stevenson knew what he was doing naming the ship Covenant–the ship where David thought he was invited by a friend.  There are all sorts of ways a crew can kidnap you.  I’m thinking that Stevenson may have given the idea to John Buchan.

Not going to support Palin anymore, but I still think she is impressive

This is all over the blogosphere already.  I didn’t bother to track down the original source.

By Dewie Whetsell, Alaskan Fisherman. (As posted in comments on Greta’s article referencing the MOVEON ad about Sarah Palin) :

The last 45 of my 66 years I’ve spent in a commercial fishing town in Alaska. I understand Alaska politics but never understood national politics well until this last year. Here’s the breaking point: Neither side of the Palin controversy gets it…It’s not about persona, style, rhetoric, it’s about doing things. Even Palin supporters never mention the things that I’m about to mention here.

1- Democrats forget when Palin was the Darling of the Democrats, because as soon as Palin took the Governor’s office away from a fellow Republican and tough SOB, Frank Murkowski, she tore into the Republican’s “Corrupt Bastards Club” (CBC) and sent them packing. Many of them are now residing in State housing and wearing orange jump suits. The Democrats reacted by skipping around the yard, throwing confetti and singing “la la la la” (well, you know how they are). Name another governor in this country that has ever done anything similar. But while you’re thinking, I’ll continue.

2- Now with the CBC gone, there were fewer Alaskan politicians to protect the huge, giant oil companies here. So, she constructed and enacted a new system of splitting the oil profits called “ACES”. Exxon (the biggest corporation in the world) protested and Sarah told them “don’t let the door hit you in the stern on your way out.” They stayed, and Alaska residents went from being merely wealthy to being filthy rich. Of course the other huge international oil companies meekly fell in line. Again, give me the name of any other governor in the country that has done anything similar.

3- The other thing she did when she walked into the governor’s office is she got the list of State requests for federal funding for projects, known as “pork”. She went through the list, took 85% of them and placed them in the “when-hell-freezes-over” stack. She let locals know that if we need something built, we’ll pay for it ourselves. Maybe she figured she could use the money she got from selling the previous governor’s jet because it was extravagant. Maybe she could use the money she saved by dismissing the governor’s cook (remarking that she could cook for her own family), giving back the State vehicle issued to her, maintaining that she already had a car, and dismissing her State provided security force (never mentioning—I imagine—that she’s packing heat herself). I’m still waiting to hear the names of those other governors.

4- Now, even with her much-ridiculed “gosh and golly” mannerism, she also managed to put together a totally new approach to getting a natural gas pipeline built which will be the biggest private construction project in the history of North America. No one else could do it although they tried. If that doesn’t impress you, then you’re trying too hard to be unimpressed while watching her do things like this while baking up a batch of brownies with her other hand.

5- For 30 years, Exxon held a lease to do exploratory drilling at a place called Point Thompson. They made excuses the entire time why they couldn’t start drilling. In truth they were holding it like an investment. No governor for 30 years could make them get started. This summer, she told them she was revoking their lease and kicking them out. They protested and threatened court action. She shrugged and reminded them that she knew the way to the court house. Alaska won again.

6- President Obama wants the nation to be on 25% renewable resources for electricity by 2025. Sarah went to the legislature and submitted her plan for Alaska to be at 50% renewables by 2025. We are already at 25%. I can give you more specifics about things done, as opposed to style and persona . Everybody wants to be cool, sound cool, look cool. But that’s just a cover-up. I’m still waiting to hear from liberals the names of other governors who can match what mine has done in two and a half years. I won’t be holding my breath.

By the way, she was content to to return to AK after the national election and go to work, but the haters wouldn’t let her. Now these adolescent screechers are obviously not scuba divers. And no one ever told them what happens when you continually jab and pester a barracuda. Without warning, it will spin around and tear your face off. Shoulda known better.

I think all this is probably true and is objectively impressive.  I get tired of people not admitting what prodigies the Palins are.  That said, I’ve come to doubt how much she would do for the pro-life cause and have reached the point where I can’t hope anymore that she will outgrow her jingoistic warmongering. (Of course, rejecting the jingoism doesn’t mean a person isn’t committed to international murder; witness Obama).

Would she be the preferable option to vote for if I bother to go to the voting booth?  Sure.  But I’m tired of having to support people just because it makes sense, in an insane hostage situation, to vote for them.  I’ve outgrown my Stockholm syndrome.

Righteousness from God?

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
And who shall stand in his holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not lift up his soul to what is false
and does not swear deceitfully.
He will receive blessing from the Lord
and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
Such is the generation of those who seek him,
who seek the face of the God of Jacob.

via Passage: Psalm 24 (ESV Bible Online).

One way you can see that there is a problem in how Evangelicals read the Bible is that they will, first, think “righteous from the God of his salvation,” must refer to imputed righteousness, second, notice that this righteousness seems to be a response to moral uprightness, third, then either consider alternative interpretations of “righteousness,” or else find a way to reverse the seeming cause and effect order of the passage.

But here the NIV is more helpful on verse 5:  “He will receive… vindication from God his Savior.”  The word “righteousness” does not have to necessarily have anything to directly to do with some kind of reckoned moral perfection.  In this case, the point is that those who belong to the Lord will be vindicated or declared in the right.  This is not a declaration that one is sinless.  It assumes God has in some way dealt with sin and the question is, for whom has he done so?

The answer primarily are those that have faith in him.  They don’t turn to idols! (v. 4).  Of course, the idea that trust in God is somehow opposed or different from a life of obedience is simply unknown to the Bible (because, if for no other reason, it is logically incoherent).  Someone who trusts in the true God, will sin, but his life will not be indistinguishable from unbelievers.  Those who refuse idols will also keep their hands clean and their hearts pure.  The first commandment, after all, command faith and trust in the LORD alone.  That is the obedience of faith.

Fighting statism with myth?

We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.

Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

via The Law, by Frederic Bastiat.

[Note: Bastiat is obviously writing a generic secular book.  That itself deserves some discussion but I’m going to overlook the issue in this post.  I often write the same way.  I think such things are allowable, but I probably have not dealt as seriously as I should with the dangers inherent in doing so.  Still, I won’t be dealing with the problem in this post]

After Adam and Eve, no human being on earth has ever come into being with these gifts that Bastiat lists: other than a very fragile hold on life.  They don’t even have language, which means their mental faculties could mostly be wasted unless they receive the essential gift that God gives us: other people.

Parents and relationships are bound up in every human’s origin.  In fact, one originally has no real liberty.  How in God’s name could Bastiat miss this in listing “gifts from God” that “precede all human legislation and are superior to it”?

Bastiat’s anti-statism and economics are often brilliant.  But this book is atrocious.  It is written for some other order of beings rather than for human beings.

The state is a false family.  The state inherently wants to prevent citizens from growing into a maturity, so it is a perverse family.  The state wants to sever love so that all social needs are met through payment and bureacracy rather than through real social relationships.

You don’t need this bizarre fiction about life, liberty, and property in order to critique the state.  Why is Bastiat resorting to it?

A book review of the Wright book on justification

Wright is bogging down the discussion by continuing to take dikaiosunē theou as a technical term for God’s covenant faithfulness without providing a convincing rationale. His justification-revision project may be crumbling on simple linguistics. In taking dikaiosunē theou as a technical term, Wright seemingly grants himself the freedom to disregard context when it fits his designs. (The phrase “technical term” in Wright nearly functions as a kind of signal to the reader that he is importing concepts not natively found in the text at hand; the phrase “controlling narrative” appears to be another such marker.) He uses dikaiosunē and pistis interchangeably when it fits his system and differently when it does not (p. 203). Wright cannot maintain “righteous” as “covenantally faithful” throughout his exegetical chapters, as his treatment of a key text like Romans 3:25–26 demonstrates (p. 206).

Along these lines, Wright’s explanation of 2 Cor 5:21 remains unpersuasive because he has not established that dikaiosunē theou means covenant faithfulness. Point after point, his exegesis is predicated on his understanding of dikaiosunē theou, but he provides no OT (or other) support for his view, merely assuming it as fact (p. 217). He then uses the phrase to draw in the “controlling narrative” of Israel and Abraham where it is not demonstrably in the apostle’s mind.

Here we locate a considerable difference between Piper and Wright. Piper may stand to reckon more with Abraham, but Wright has made too much of the patriarch. And in doing so, Wright is unwilling to work any further backward than Gen 12, saying that “Abraham is where it all starts” (p. 217). This gets at a sizeable shortcoming in Wright: He does not go back far enough and ask the ultimate questions. What is God’s purpose in creation before there ever was a covenant with Abraham—or ever was creation? Why most ultimately does God mean “to set the world to rights”? Was God righteous before he made a covenant with Abraham? Was he righteous before he created the world? Because Wright begins with Abraham and does not grapple with the ultimate questions, his base is shallow and the structure is unstable.

via Themelios | Issue 34-3.

Since I haven’t read either book, I can’t say too much about this. But 1) Wright has said repeatedly Abraham was a “new Adam” chosen to deal with sin and bring salvation (whether he reiterates the point in the book I cannot say); and 2) Wright’s view on the righteousness of God is, to my mind, completely convincing.  I am thankful to God I got pointed in this direction by Wright and find it incredible that people are digging in their heels on this point.  If there is a counter-argument, this review didn’t bother to articulate it.

Reader beware: Doug commends the review and Doug, unlike me, has read both books.  That is weighty to my mind, but so far I haven’t changed my opinion on the Wright that I have read.

Conditionality and the pseudo-calvinist dichotomy

Continuing.

Reading at the very beginning of Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford Historical Monographs), in the introduction, it already seems to be going astray.

Page 3:

The characteristic theology of English Protestant sainthood was Calvinism, centring [sic] on a belief in divine predestination, both double and absolute, whereby man’s destiny, either election to Heaven or reprobation to Hell, is not conditioned by faith but depends instead on the will of God.

How can anyone who really knows anything about the Bible or the teachings of John Calvin make this the definition of “Calvinism”?

Anti-Extreme-Fatalists?

So I got Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford Historical Monographs) out of the Library again (i.e. after doing it the first time twelve years ago).

I’ll probably be blogging some more about it.  In my opinion, the “extremism” of the Calvinists might explain why they were so credibly though slanderously lumped with the Puritans.

Here’s stuff I’ve posted from before:

Slandering the English Calvinists

Two Cheers for Arminianism

Someone should have told Cowper that election was good news

Oh, and that last one reminded me of an entry I had forgotten about that was posted by Jandy: on William Cowper.

By the way, the issue was not really “extreme fatalism” in the sense of absolute fore-ordination.  The issue was more the trap that Oedipus found himself in–where he is sent to his destiny despite his decisions and his moral character.

Open during the week

From James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, p. 59.

The twentieth-century Protestant Church locked six days a week has no precedents in the Reformation.  All the Reformed churches of the sixteenth century conducted weekday services before and after working hours.  We have noted the Geneva schedule.  In Strassburg there was a weekday service of “morning prayer” with sermon in the parish churches at four or five o’clock in the morning.  The service consisted of the general confession, the reading of Scripture and an exhortation based upon it, a suitable pause for private prayers, closed by the minister with a collect and blessing.  For late risers there was also a daily sermon at eight o’clock in the cathedral.  The cathedral, again, was the scene for daily evening prayer with sermon.  In this fashion provision was made for virtually everyone to attend worship with Biblical sermon twice daily either in the cathedral or in parish churches.  Each series of services would follow its own systems of Bible readings , the Communion services on Sunday normally using the Gospels, the other services other portions of Scripture.