Monthly Archives: June 2010

If you need your terror today

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There are some people that, no matter what I’m doing when I hear them, I have to stop and listen. On the short list, very near the top, is Mohamed El-Erian of bond investment giant, PIMCO.

via Jiminger.Com » The New Normal.

Go watch the video.

I am still avoiding this mostly, but I still visit blogs and other social media and when I suffer fear I still tend to share it.

God has us in his hand. The only thing I can suggest is pray and move on.  Jesus preached the sermon on the mount in a time of crisis as well:

24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? 28 And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

34 “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble (Matthew 6).

Why PostMillennialism is the enemy

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There was a time when Reformed theologians were PostMillennial.  Charles Hodge was.  Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was too.  So was John Murry though he didn’t write about it as much.

But we’ve learned better. We now know that PostMillennialism is the enemy.

It is easy to miss this when one thinks about PostMillennialism as hope for the future through confidence in Jesus and his Spirit to overcome the world. That “happy face” of PostMillennialism hides the danger.  The perfidy of PostMillennialism is that hope in the future is a slander regarding the present and the past.

The enmity can be hidden as long as one is confident that the entire plan of the future is nothing more than the spread of one’s own (or one’s community’s) accomplishments to the unwashed masses across the globe.  But eventually one realizes that PostMillennialism cannot be limited in that way.

PostMillennialism is the ultimate doctrine for self-limitation. It means the world is young. It means the world is just beginning. It means that the world is going to change past recognition and be better for it. It means your descendants are going to live in a better place and look back on all you love, believe, and hold dear as barely tolerable–a mixture of some truth and good with a great deal of error and idiocy.

And we cannot have this. We know our children must worship us. They must forever venerate our doctrinal discoveries, our worship practices, our glorious truths and accomplishments. Just as we have faithfully venerated (or so we claim) certain past stages in history as the ultimate perfections that can never be surpassed, so must they continue the adoration. God would never have it otherwise.

Think about how we Evangelical Protestants view the “church fathers.”  About the only one we can tolerate is Augustine of Hippo.  And it is obvious as soon as you read him that he would be lost in confusion if he were to be brought back to earth today.  Both the modern Roman Catholic and Protestant churches would be alien territory.  We appreciate Augustine for his accomplishments but it is highly doubtful that he would understand our appreciation or the way he has helped bring about a new world.  Any sense of accomplishment would almost certainly be drowned out by the fact that this world is not one he could ever have envisioned.

We cannot have this.  If the future will be that alien then it must be evil, and PostMillennialism denies that fundamental fact. We need an eschatology that allows us to adore a particular point in the present and/or recent past and claim it was the most ultimate accomplishment that will ever be seen in human history between Pentecost and the Second Coming.

PostMillennialism does not allow for that confidence.  It claims our world is only half-baked and we are waiting for a better one.  It claims we will develop better theology, better worship, and better culture.  But we already have or had the best. The world is in sin for ever moving on.

The churches that do not know and venerate our heritage are in sin for not learning and venerating our history and our most revered historical periods. We need an eschatology that permits us to look down upon them for not ultimatizing our favored historical events.

The Bible is not sufficient for tomorrow. They need our light that we have safely guarded from the time it shone until now. They need to join with us in longing for the past rather than hoping for a better future.

Off the cuff about the Stock Market and the Parasite Class

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Monetary inflation does not simply make prices rise for everyone. Price inflation is (all other things being equal) the societal recognition that monetary inflation has already taken place. The people who first got the new money were able to spend it before prices rose. Prices rose as people noticed that they were losing stock faster than before and raised prices to slow down the purchasing. (Would you rather have a store with empty shelves and only as much revenue as last month? Or would you like to get more money from the higher demand for your goods?)

So the rise in the prices is mainly a tax on those farther away from the new money. Those selling goods and services to the government will profit while janitors will see their standard of living slip lower.

How this money game works in the American bureausaur is not clear to me. But I’m beginning to wonder if it is connected to the stock market. To put it simply, if I want affordable gas and heating prices, then I want the DOW and Nasdaq to descend into the toilet. Immediately prices go down as well. And then I can afford to live.

So am I wrong? Is a rising DOW simply a measure of a successful predator class practicing “siphon up” economics?

A really great illustration for common grace and Christians in politics

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Bringing it home to our point, we reject John Stuart Mill, not liberty. We reject Ayn Rand, not liberty. Indeed, if we understand what the Spirit of God is doing in the world (2 Cor. 3:17), we reject idolatrous accounts of individual freedoms because we love liberty. I look dubiously at the medicine man who shuffles around in a heathenish circle shaking his rattle, but I must still receive the rain with gladness. If I reject the rain because of the medicine man, then I am actually rejecting Christ (Acts 14:17).

via Look at All Those Alabaster Cities.

Wait no, I must add the conclusion even though it is not included in the point I was linking…:

If we accept the need for the kind of open Jesus-is-Lord-theocracy, of the kind argued for by Wilson, then bad things might start to happen.

Right. What might happen? If we bowed the knee to Jesus Christ, might we start murdering over a million kids in the womb a year? If we acknowledged Christ, might it lead to sodomite parades in the streets of our major cities? If we confessed that Jesus rose from the dead, might we suddenly be on the brink of of a major war in the Middle East? If we allowed that our government is junior to the government of Christ in Heaven, might we then rush to spend trillions of dollars we don’t have? This is a good point, certainly, and I never thought of it that way before. I can see why people wouldn’t want to turn away from the secular paradise we have built. I mean, look at all those alabaster cities out there, undimmed by human tears.

Reminds me of an accusation against anarchist libertarians claiming they are trying to repeal the 20th century. And the response: The era of mass murder in mass war and genocide? Who wouldn’t want to repeal that monster?

The most worthwhile totally wrong essay on Grace in the Covenant of Works

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The tide of Reformed opinion is that the first covenant God made with Adam was somehow gracious. The grace, it is argued, enters in one or both of two places: 1) God was not bound to offer Adam any reward for his obedience but could have required such obedience from him without any reward. That God chose to offer a reward through a covenant is considered gracious. 2) The reward God offered is so out of proportion to the obedience required that the size of the reward constitutes a further act of grace.

A veritable All-Star team of Reformed heroes have subscribed to one or both of those points, asserting or implying grace in the covenant of works: William Ames, Johannes Cocceius, Frances Turretin, the Westminster Divines[1], John Owen, Thomas Boston, R. L. Dabney, Geerhardus Vos, John Murray, Louis Berkhof, Anthony Hoekema, Sinclair Ferguson, Richard Gaffin. Only a handful — Johannes Heidegger, Herman Witsius, Charles Hodge — hold out against this tide. And Witsius does so after much agonizing. He knows what he's up against.

Read the rest at Several Quick Arguments that the Covenant of Works Is Not Gracious – Bill Baldwin. Though, in my opinion, it is full of entirely false and illogical inferences.  It is the basic honesty and refusal to engage in revisionism that makes the paper stand out as valuable (and virtually an endangered species in “Reformed watchdog” writing today).

Wry amusement recommended

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For all her popularity, Shirley Jackson won surprisingly little recognition. She received no awards or prizes, grants or fellowships; her name was often omitted from lists on which it clearly belonged, or which it should have led. She saw those honors go to inferior writers, or to writers who were no writers, without bitterness, but with the wry amusement which was her habitual attitude toward her own life and career…

via DarkEcho/HorrorOnline: Shirley Jackson & The Haunting of Hill House.

Is the body of Christ invisible or visible?

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1. The catholic or universal church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.

2. The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.

via Confession of Faith.

I’ve run into people who insist that the descriptions in these two paragraphs are mutually exclusive.  Thus, if the invisible church is called the body of Christ, then the visible church must not be the body of Christ.

This is false both to tradition and to Scripture (because the tradition is rooted in Scripture).

The tradition has an accurate witness in the PCA’s Book of Church Order. In part two of the Preface we read:

The Presbyterian Church in America, in setting forth the form of government founded upon and agreeable to the Word of God, reiterates the following great principles which have governed the formation of the plan

There then follows a list of these principles. The third one begins:

Our blessed Saviour, for the edification of the visible Church, which is His body, has appointed officers not only to preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments, but also to exercise discipline for the preservation both of truth and duty.

So we have a straightforward definition of the visible church as the body of Christ.  In fact we have more than one.  For example, again in the BCO:

CHAPTER 2

The Visible Church Defined

2-1. The Visible Church before the law, under the law, and now under the Gospel, is one and the same and consists of all those who make profession of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, together with their children.

2-2. This visible unity of the body of Christ, though obscured, is not destroyed by its division into different denominations of professing Christians; but all of these which maintain the Word and Sacraments in their fundamental integrity are to be recognized as true branches of the Church of Jesus Christ.

2-3. It is according to scriptural example that the Church should be divided into many individual churches.

Note the consistency. If the visible church was not the body of Christ, then the divisions in the church could not possibly either obscure, or raise the issue of destroying, the unity of the body of Christ.

Nothing in this material is innovative or novel.  I’ll let someone else go through all the evidence in detail, but this is standard ecclesiology in the Reformed tradition and probably other traditions as well.

And it follows from Scripture. First Corinthians 12 clearly describes a visible community with visible offices and it states in the middle:

12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

In fact, this chapter has been used to explain visible church offices throughout Church history.  It shows up in the prooftexts for the next paragraph in Chapter 25 of the Westminster Confession:

III. Unto this catholic visible Church Christ has given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and does, by His own presence and Spirit, according to His promise, make them effectual thereunto.

1CO 12:28 And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues. EPH 4:11 And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; 12 For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: 13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

In fact that unity of the body mentioned in the Book of Church Order also comes from passages in the Bible about he body.  For example: “This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3.6). In context this is plainly talking about a visible reception of Jews and Gentiles in one community.

So the body of Christ is not invisible (only). It is visible.

For further reading:

Visible Church & Body of Christ: A Logic Test for the PCA

Law & Gospel in Presbyterianism

Is Sunday School creepy enough?

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100 CupboardsHow many kids grow up with the nagging feeling that the whole “flood thing” was a bit of an overreaction? Look at the felt board and listen to Mr. Sunday School Teach, and you’ll get the impression that people had a big party, stayed up too late, and maybe got a little tipsy. And so God . . . smote the earth, collapsed the sky, and sent the continents spinning like air hockey pucks, killing pretty much EVERYTHING?

Muting the black distorts God. Revealing it is frequently theodicy.

via The Rabbit Room. In which N. D. Wilson responds to a comment thread on an excellent plug for his book 100 cupboards.

We are the Hobbits

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The_HobbitI loved this essay from The Rabbit Room because I think it captures the genius of Tolkien’s strategy really well. I elaborate here not because I think it needs additional commentary but because I can’t help myself after reading such a helpful essay.

Lewis like many other fantasy authors before and after wrote about mere mortals finding their way into a magical realm.  The one exception is the story of Shasta, except that Calormene is somehow as secular and magicless as any modern place so that the effect is the same.  So the story of Shasta comes closest to resembling Tolkien’s strategy.

Tolkien starts The Hobbit as well as The Lord of the Rings with a magical creature that is quiet, short, and lives in a hole.  That is all a misdirection.  The Hobbits are actually comfortable English middle class.  They know virtually nothing about the heroic and magical world of great men, elves, dwarves, and dragons (Note to Mozilla: get your spell checker to recognize Tolkien’s revision of the dwarf plural just as you have done for his revision of elves and elven rather than elfin.)

In other words, the Hobbits for all their exoticism are actually just us.  Magic is great for fireworks but the perils are not recognized.  Their general insularity and xenophobia does not actually amount to realistic fear of the dangers around them (it just means that they are over-confident in their self-sufficiency).  As I point out in my forthcoming biography, Tolkien shows the only Hobbits capable of resisting tyranny from the outside are those who left the Shire to face the outside.

Disbelief in dragons just makes you easy prey to them.