Monthly Archives: November 2010

Grace liberates us from false guilt, from the lying standards of the devil, concocted to provide you with perpetual torment

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An American woman who is happy about her weight is as rare as a comet. If she lives guilt-free concerning what she eats, she is a rare specimen. If that one woman is here this morning, she can ignore the rest of this . . . but for the rest of you, listen to the grace of God. Hear these words from God. God the Father doesn’t care that you weigh that extra 15 pounds. Neither does the Holy Spirit. Jesus doesn’t care about that ten pounds either. Not even a little bit. If God cared about this, He would have put something about it in the Bible. Well, if He doesn’t care, who does? Well, the devil does. He loves to accuse. All those boney women in the clothes catalogs care—they wouldn’t be sneering that way at you if they didn’t care. All those women’s magazine at the supermarket care—why can’t you be made out of bones and silicon? What could be more natural?

via Bones and Silicon.

Elaboration on the theodicy in Romans

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Spelling out this:

Paul’s argument in Romans runs from 1.16 through 11.36:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth…

For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

(As I was writing with this I realized that the ellipses shows us Paul’s answer to the problem of evil, but I digress)

The two quotations that begin and end Paul’s argument come from Habakkuk and then Job smudged with Isaiah.

In other words, Paul’s argument begins and ends with theodicy. Thus, Habakkuk in some context:

Are you not from everlasting,
O Lord my God, my Holy One?
We shall not die.
O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment,
and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.
You who are of purer eyes than to see evil
and cannot look at wrong,
why do you idly look at traitors
and remain silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he?
You make mankind like the fish of the sea,
like crawling things that have no ruler.
He brings all of them up with a hook;
he drags them out with his net;
he gathers them in his dragnet;
so he rejoices and is glad.
Therefore he sacrifices to his net
and makes offerings to his dragnet;
for by them he lives in luxury,
and his food is rich.
Is he then to keep on emptying his net
and mercilessly killing nations forever?

I will take my stand at my watchpost
and station myself on the tower,
and look out to see what he will say to me,
and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

And the Lord answered me:

“Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so he may run who reads it.
For still the vision awaits its appointed time;
it hastens to the end—it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come; it will not delay.

“Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.

More Habbakuk in Romans

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In Habbakuk 2-3 we find this:

Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake;
to a silent stone, Arise!
Can this teach?
Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver,
and there is no breath at all in it.
But the LORD is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him.”

A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet, according to Shigionoth.

“O Lord, I have heard the report of you,
and your work, O LORD, do I fear.
In the midst of the years revive it;
in the midst of the years make it known;
in wrath remember mercy….”

I find it hard to believe that Paul didn’t think Habbakuk was relevant along with Isaiah 53.1 when he wrote in Romans 10,

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what our report?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Paul has already established that every mouth is stopped (Romans 3.19). The rest of Romans 10 mentions the mouth three times as the means of salvation.

3 Pauline passages you must never read together

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Galatians 5:6

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

Galatians 6:15

For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

1 Corinthians 7:19

For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God.

My 3 recent “Neos”

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I mean that as the plural of the name “Neo” from the movie, “The Matrix” (which as a standalone was the Christian movie of the decade).

Neo: Got the money?

Choi: Two grand.

Neo: Hold on.

Choi: Hallelujah. You’re my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.

via Neo/Christ Parallels in The Matrix.

Kind of blasphemous for what looks like a drug deal and seems to be a software piracy. But as the Israelites had a Redeemer in Moses, I have at the moment three of my own personal Jesus Christs that I think are sent by the original and true one to help me.

This is about Exodus. To put it in Dave-Ramsey-speak, if you are sick and tired of being sick and tired you might need one of more of the following helpers:

Neo #1: John Taylor Gatto

Neo #2: Paul Campos (and several others)

Neo #3: Dave Ramsey (and maybe a couple of others)

If I have a chance I’ll blog some more explanations. But google should give you an idea.

Consumer Christians in an Age of Plastic: Prohibitions, Arguments from Silence, & Weird Priorities

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Awhile back I noticed somewhere that the Bible positively prohibits Israel’s rulers from multiplying wives (inter- and intranational covenants/treaties) and multiplying horses and chariots (war technology). It also never says that rulers are supposed to use their tax revenues to fund entitlements for the population or some portion of the population. So American Evangelicals often argue in favor of multiplying and stockpiling WMD and against the legitimacy of entitlements and welfare.

A related thought occurs to me now. We have, as far as I can tell, zero prohibitions in Scripture barring anyone from receiving financial aid from the civil magistrate, but we have a bunch of prohibitions in the Bible against going into debt, or at least warnings that it is a stupid and dangerous thing to do. But Evangelicals are far more likely to resist receiving government assistance than they are likely to avoid debt.

Maybe Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express are actually more economically dangerous and enslaving than the Welfare State. I’m not settled on that point, but I think it is worth considering.

Consumer Christians in An Age of Plastic: The College Years

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Before the blogosphere brought debate-p07n to your lap, you had to go to a church or college to get in ideological fights to affirm your superiority over others. Back in the 80s, the Religious Right was something of a phenomenon, which meant it was an object of general scorn on Christian college campuses–not always for imaginary reasons, but one got the impression that real facts were only collected by happy accident.

Back then Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was a Bible for the cool socially conscious Christian college student who wasn’t smart enough to get a computer or business degree but wanted to feel like he was making the right choice.  And then came out David Chilton’s Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators which allowed students like me to feel the same. The blogosphere was still stuck in book publishing back then.

So there were sides drawn on some Christian college campuses: Evangelicals for Socialist Action versus Ugly Americans for Christ or something like that. And the debates and arguments provided great entertainment over minimum wage law, welfare, and the legitimacy of the profit motive, etc.

And we discussed this stuff not just in class, or on bulletin boards (literal real space bulletin boards where we posted notes made of real paper), or in the school student newspaper–but often while eating Pizza in a dorm room, or while eating chicken wings at the campus fast food joint. Or we would discuss it in the car while we were going out to a rock concert or a restaurant (even that was a mini-road trip where I went to college).

We paid for food on many an evening, even though we were all on the meal plan.

None of us had plastic yet, then in the second half of the eighties. I remembered being amazed at all the direct mail we were sent right before graduation telling us to buy a new car on credit.

But our behavior was rather interesting.

I have good authority that Ron Sider lived what he preached. He wanted everyone to live on $38k in 80s dollars, if I recall correctly, so that they gave everything else away. This feat required low-budget living and careful planning. It meant living on a severe budget and thus tracking expenses.

And I opposed this ESA agenda with a message about persistence in labor, patience, saving, risk-taking, and responsibility for one’s life and the lives of one’s dependents.

And we argued about this over pizza.

It never occurred to me to point out that none of my leftist student friends seemed to be even slightly prepared for a life of austerity and budgeting so that they could give away the excess. And it never occurred to me that the money I earned in college was for any other purpose other than to spend on immediate wants–my needs were taken care of along with tuition.

Saving and all the rest were for other people in another life. As long as I worked at graduating with a decent GPA, nothing else mattered. I was free to spend and consume. Real economic initiative and responsibility beyond that one duty would wait for when I was in the real world with a real job.

I lived in a bubble–to use a pregnant financial term.

I and my ESA friends lived exactly the same sort of economic life.

And Dave Ramsey and Ron Sider have more in common with each other than they did with either group of students.

Stop promoting Roman Catholicism in the name of promoting the Reformation

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When I finished reading the book [i.e. Is the Reformation Over], I have to confess that I agreed with the authors, in that it does indeed seem that the Reformation is over for large tracts of evangelicalism; yet the authors themselves do not draw the obvious conclusion from their own arguments. Every year I tell my Reformation history class that Roman Catholicism is, at least in the West, the default position. Rome has a better claim to historical continuity and institutional unity than any Protestant denomination, let alone the strange hybrid that is evangelicalism; in the light of these facts, therefore, we need good, solid reasons for not being Catholic; not being a Catholic should, in others words, be a positive act of will and commitment, something we need to get out of bed determined to do each and every day. It would seem, however, that if Noll and Nystrom are correct, many who call themselves evangelical really lack any good reason for such an act of will; and the obvious conclusion, therefore, should be that they do the decent thing and rejoin the Roman Catholic Church. I cannot go down that path myself, primarily because of my view of justification by faith and because of my ecclesiology; but those who reject the former and lack the latter have no real basis upon which to perpetuate what is, in effect, an act of schism on their part. For such, the Reformation is over; for me, the fat lady has yet to sing; in fact, I am not sure at this time that she has even left her dressing room. (my emphasis)

via Trueman and Prolegomena to “How would Protestants know when to return?” | Called to Communion.

This quotation from a Reformed Protestant is lifted from a Roman Catholic blog. Understandably so.

I’ll blog about aspects of this more, some day, but for now I’ll make some statements for the record.

  • The Roman Catholic Church was not the Western Medieval Church nor vice versa. There is no Church that a Protestant (or a contemporary Roman Catholic) can return to, unless they invent time travel.
  • Justification by faith alone is not the only reason for the Protestant Reformation.
  • Justification by faith alone was not the only reason that justifies the schisms which took place during the Reformation.
  • This stuff is so obvious that one needs to engage in some analysis of personal motives to explain why it would be avoided by teachers who claim the heritage of the Protestant Reformation.
  • None of the problems in Evangelicalism make it worthwhile to tell Evangelicals that they need to join us or become Roman Catholic.

Christine O’Donnell wrote about Tolkien and women? If only I had known earlier!

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In the midst of piles of Lord of the Rings merchandise on every shelf, Tolkien’s wisdom is applied to just about everything — Tolkien and industrialization, Tolkien and communism, Tolkien and religion, etc. What’s surprising, especially in today’s hypersensitive post-Gloria Steinem world, is the dearth of commentary on Tolkien and women.

Read the rest The Women of Middle Earth | Catholic Exchange.