First, there is a new podcast available here. I haven’t watched it yet.

Also, Jeff’s book on the sidbar now has existence in real reality rather than only in virtual reality. Orders are being shipped out today. You should get one!

First there is Mac and now there is this: I love Web 2.0!  I especially love all the productivity/organization sites.  I could avoid work all day using them.

John’s post on his reading is all excellent, but I have to especially comment on his predicting regarding Harry Potter.

Harry was impervious to Voldemort’s curse because his mother refused to step out of Voldemort’s way. Voldemort even tormented her with the fact (as I remember) that she wasn’t really even giving her life in exchange as far as she knew because he would simply kill the boy after she was dead. She was more or less insisting on dying in solidarity with her infant.

But something changed and her death and love meant that Harry was protected.

So that’s the rule.

If Voldemort goes after the Durseleys he will be going after the worst possible people. Harry can have no illusions about their worthiness. They are despicable. So if he dies to protect them, then he will have died in solidarity with the least deserving of Muggles. If Malfoy is somehow thrown in, then he will die for the most hateful of wizards aside from Voldemort himself.

So Voldmort will be impotent. Not only will the Durseley’s be protected, but a fortoriori, so will Ron and Hermione. If he loves and dies for those who are the least lovely, then he will in principle have covered for everyone else as well. The whole cosmos will be immune to Voldemort’s curse because Harry will have absorbed it for everyone.

I am listening to an interview with Rene Girard about mimetic desire! Go here.

And can anyone identify the bumper music that starts off the reading from the Inferno?

I don’t know how much longer it will be available.

From Virgin’s Womb to Empty Tomb
Isaiah 26.16-19; Luke 1.26-38; Romans 4.16-25

Congregation of the Lord, tonight I want to remind you of the soap opera that we all believe, by which we live, and by which we will be saved.

1. Domesticity of the Gospel

If I told you that someone had “domesticated Christmas,” or that the church was guilty of “domesticating the gospel,” or that the secular world always tries to domesticate the Bible, you would understand that I was describing something really negative. The Gospel is the power of God for salvation and to speak of domesticity doesn’t refer to power but to being tamed. And we all know, at least when we are reminded, that God is not tame and so neither can be the stories about what he has done. C. S. Lewis was used by God to help us all in that way. Most of us have probably already thought of the words just now, as I have been talking, that he immortalized in his fantasy stories: “He is not a tame lion.” This was Lewis’ description of Jesus, and he was right.

But something doesn’t quite fit. The Bible is the story of rescue from slavery, from an evil tyrant. In John’s vision in revelation he sees the Devil as a great dragon. We have stories about evil tyrants bent on domination.

Darth Vader, Sauron, Lord Voldemort–someone who seems demonic or the very incarnation of death.

We have stories of great battles fought and wars and massive conflicts. You would expect the Bible to follow that pattern. It to involves a struggle with a great tyrant. Jesus came to defeat an overlord. As we read in Hebrews 2:

14 Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Sometimes the Bible meets these expectations. The story of the Exodus involves that sort of conflict and the stories in Joshua do too. There are other examples. David and Goliath is a classic.

But especially at the beginning, what we find are family melodramas. We find in Genesis over and over again that someone really wants to have a baby. In fact, it is not just Abraham and Sarah. If we read carefully we realize that Noah and his wife had to wait much longer than any of their contemporaries to have children, and that it took Isaac and Rebekah decades of waiting before they just had twins. And then the story of Jacob’s two wives and their quests for children read in some ways like an HBO melodrama about Mormon polygamists.

2. Long struggle to give birth

The virgin birth is another chapter in the story of the long struggle to have a baby. While the war stories are there, the baby stories come first. Everything in Exodus starts with the struggle to have a baby boy survive Egypt’s attempt to kill him. David comes on the scene as someone reached by Samuel. And Samuel too begins with the story of a woman like Rachel, with an overly fertile rival wife to her husband and a great struggle to have a baby. Even Samson’s funny war on the Philistines starts with a woman who can’t get pregnant unless God intervenes.

And Mary is just like that. We commonly think of the virgin birth as related to his deity. There may be some application to debates about Christ’s deity but the story in the Scriptures is concerned with showing that Jesus is the true new beginning–a new Adam. In Luke, Mary is compared to Elizabeth who, as an elderly barren woman with an elderly husband is obviously a new Sarah with a new Abraham.

The lesson of Mary’s pregnancy and birth to the savior is that salvation:

depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the Jew but also to any Gentile as well who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” 23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

You see, the virgin birth shows that God can make life from the dead and call into existence things that are not. And the only response is trust in God’s promise. Mary’s belief that God would keep his promise showed that she was a true daughter of Abraham.

It may seem implausible, that the salvation of the world was brought about through people trusting God for their domestic problems—for something as basic as a baby Believing in God in the melodrama of family life was the precondition to any great war victory over the” deathlord.”

3. Long wait for resurrection

The story of Christmas is a foreshadowing of the story of Easter. This is not just because we know that was Jesus’ purpose, but also because the barren womb is firmly established in the Bible as an image and sign of the problem of death. Our reading in Isaiah involves a prophecy of God’s people in exile longing to be saved. And their incapacity to escape is at once compared to the inability to conceive—they could give birth only to wind—and at the same time a corpse trapped in a tomb. But God gives babies because he can even give life to the dead.

That is why, by the way, Jesus’ title as the risen and exalted one, is “firstborn of the dead.” Paul ascribes this to him in Colossians 1.18 and Jesus himself claims the title when he appears to the Apostle John in Revelation 1.5. In fact, we see this connection in the first sermon after the giving of the Spirit in Pentecost

So the message of Christmas is the message of the Gospel. God can bring about a new creation that we are impotent to bring about ourselves, and we should therefore trust Him to keep his promises. He has revealed to us that Christ has risen from the dead and that, even now, though we don’t see it, all things are being put under Jesus’ feet.

We need to remember the manner in which salvation was brought to us on Christmas, because our tendency is only to remember the “shock and awe” of the angel’s singing to the shepherds or the star and the wise man. But many people didn’t hear the angels or see the star. Salvation started with a baby. God began intervening in the world by coming in a domestic setting.

And if we think that the struggles in our lives don’t measure up to the really important things we see in Scripture, then maybe we’re missing the point. Your soap operas, the domestic struggles of your lives—they matter to God. If you can trust him to raise you from the dead than you can trust him in these seemingly ordinary and small matters.

One of the birth stories we find in the Bible is the story of Samson’s birth at the end of Judges. That is an interesting place because Samson’s mother is not the only woman mentioned in Judges who is an instrument of salvation. Deborah is mentioned earlier as a mother to Israel and a judge. And she is tied to Jael who delivers God’s people by using household tools. Jael lives in tents and when an evil war leader asks her for shelter, she lures him to sleep and then hammers a tent peg through her head. Another woman destroys a pagan chief by breaking his head open with a millstone, a tool she would normally use for the process of making bread. And these household items are also used by men in Judges. Shamgar kills six hundred Philistines with an ox goad, not a sword or spear.

Here we have stories of God’s people torn apart by professional armies led by Darth Vader characters, and they are not destroyed by sword or bow or horse of chariot. In many cases they are the only ones who have these things. They are destroyed by domestic life. By household objects and by babies.

Sometimes we can think that domestic life is a distraction and that God wants us to do something great. I’m not going to say that can never happen, but God chose to meet the legions of Satan with a baby from a struggling family. He wants you to trust him to be spreading the kingdom even through the mundane affairs of your family life.

Postscript: While delivering a speech from the above, I couldn’t help but point out that our taste for drama is often very much like the Gospel story. The most popular action movies or TV series are the ones with a lot of family melodrama in them.

Eph. IV. 4-6.–There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.

This is the image of the CHURCH, as delineated by the hand of the inspired Apostle. In the whole world, we find nothing so resplendently beautiful and glorious, under any other form. The picture is intended to enforce the great duty of charity and peace, among those who bear the Christian name. In the preceding part of the epistle, Christ is exhibited as the end of all separations and strife to them that believe, and the author of a new spiritual creation, in which all former distinctions were to be regarded as swallowed up and abolished forever. Reference is had in this representation primarily to the old division of Jew and Gentile; but in its true spirit and sense, it is plainly as comprehensive as humanity itself, and looks therefore directly to every other distinction of the same sort, that ever has been or ever shall be known in the world. Christianity is the universal solvent, in with all opposites are required to give up their previous affinities, no matter how old and stubborn, and flow together in a new combination, pervaded with harmony only and light at every point. “In Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth anything, not uncircumcision, but a new creature.” “Those who were far off, are made nigh by his blood.” “He is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; making in himself of twain one new man.” In him, all spiritual antagonism among men is subverted. The human world is reconciled first with God, and then with itself, by entering with living consciousness into the ground of its own life as revealed in his person. Such is the idea of the Church, which is “the body of Christ, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.” And now at length, passing from doctrine to practice, the Apostle calls upon those to whom he wrote to surrender themselves fully to the claims of this exalted constitution. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord beseech you, that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called. With all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Such a temper, and such a life, are necessarily included in the very conception of the Church, as here described. “There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” He does not say, Let there be one body and one Spirit, as simply urging Christians to seek such agreement among themselves as might justify this view of their state; but the fact is assumed as already in existence, and is made the ground accordingly of the exhortation that goes before. There is one body and Spirit in the bond of peace. The unity of the Church is not something which results first from the thought and purpose of her vast membership, of which it is composed; but on the contrary, it is the ground out of which this membership itself springs, and in which perpetually it stands, and from which it must derive evermore all its harmony, and stability, and activity, and strength.

From the beginning, this great truth has dwelt deep in the consciousness of the Christian world. Through all ages, and in all lands, that consciousness has been uttering itself as with one mouth, in the article of the creed, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. The Church is one and universal. Her unity is essential to her existence. Particular Christians, and particular congregations, and particular religious denominations, can be true to themselves only as they stand in the full, free sense of this thought, and make it the object of their calling to fulfil its requisitions. The manifold is required to feel itself one. All particularism here must be false, that seeks to maintain itself as such, in proportion exactly as it is found in conflict with the general and universal, as embraced in the true idea of the body of Christ.

I propose to consider, in the further prosecution of the subject at this time, first, the Nature and Constitution of the Holy Catholic Church, in the view now stated; and secondly, the Duty of Christians as it regards the unity, by which it is declared to be thus Catholic, and holy, and true. [Read the Rest].

When I originally keyboarded and published this on Theologia, I was trying to promote steps toward unity I had already seen taking place among Reformed denominations and encourage Evangelicalism to to reform its fissional tradition.

What I never expected was to have to direct this preaching to professors in cavlinistic institutions.

Pretty sad. I have been surprised lately at how dogmatically and vociferously some Reformed amillennialists have expressed themselves toward postmillennialism–a well-represented eschatalogical option in the history of the Reformed churches (given the way some other traditions from these churches are exalted by these same people it is rather difficult to understand how the two attitudes can exist in the same persons). It is hard not to wonder if the amil-legislation isn’t a compensating mechanism. Does anyone think this sort of attitude towards other Christian churches is remotely outward-facing? Is this not a recipe for turning the Reformed churches into the sociological equivalent of an inbred and shrinking family?

Hat Tip: Lord Voldemort (unless that title belongs to another who must not be named)

For the one or two of you who haven’t seen it yet: here’s the link.

Here is an open letter to R. Scott Clark.

If you have any interest in “the state of the union” in the Evangelical reformed world, this is a really good primer.

But it really doesn’t quite give you a picture of how serious the situation is.

Here is Clark’s answer to why some Reformed people are such jerks. This doesn’t surprise me too much. Hide in plain sight is a workable strategy.

What bothers me is that people who are willing to be moral arbiters for others turn a blind eye and act like his statement should be taken seriously.

Dr. Clark is a man burning bright with flaming accusations. That this man has the respect of people who, one would think, would never behave this way, and who even make a point of frowning on those who do when they aren’t in their approved social circle, is telling.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to give it free press and approval.