Here:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

There has been some interesting stuff linking Haggard’s behavior and his ideas. Great. But I can easily think of a stalwart Reformed PCA minister caught in a public sexual scandal (involving criminal charges before the civil magistrate). This was a person known nationally for being a defender of Reformed Orthodoxy.

When these things happen, they are supposed to serve as object lessons for other ministers to fear (1 Tim 5.20). We are not well served with a denominational press that does not report such things, but leaves us to find out for ourselves and allows us to easily proclaim that the public scandals that are reported among Evangelicals are due to their departure from orthodoxy.

I almost fisked this. But then I realized the quotation is fine. It says nothing negative about a pragmatic education. Rather, all it says is that such an education ought not be promoted in a way that encourages selfishness.

But lets be clear. People who want to spend many thousands of dollars on an education without regard to its pragmatic value are people who have come into money more easily than the rest of us. And as far as helping the community, learning how to amass wealth is a necessary step (Eph 4.28) for substantial “charitable acts.”

I’m all for liberal education among the leisure class. My quality of life is better for it. But the rest of us need to consider other factors in making decisions about education.

This post has so many great quotations about tradition and innovation, I don’t know where to begin. I guess I will stop at the title quotation, which comes from Bernard of Chartres: “Like dwarfs, on the shoulders of giants, we see farther than they.” That’s a great tast, but, please, read the whole thing!

This is an intense post for anyone who loves Scripture in our day and age, in the Evangelical culture of paranoia (an understandable reaction to the other culture–the one of compromise–but no more pleasing to God). Read the whole thing, but here is a highlight

All this is a build-up to an expression of gratitude — gratitude for four men that I would vote against in a presbyterial ordination exam were they, by some mishap, to find themselves sitting for one. I would vote against them because their views of Scripture range from troubling to outrageous. And yet, I still owe an immeasurable debt to them. These things are hard to quantify, but it is at least clear to me that the shape of a great deal of what I see in Scripture has been radically affected by what these men have pointed out to me. And once they have pointed it out, there it is, right there. Right on the top of the suitcase, with a sunbeam shining on it. These men are, in order, C.S. Lewis, N.T. Wright, Robert Farrar Capon, and Rene Girard. I owe them all a great deal, as I said, even though all of them say appalling things, especially Capon. But there it is anyway.

A friend loaned me Girard but I haven’t started yet.

So then, as of right now, who would my four be? This is what comes to mind off the top of my head:

• N. T. Wright
• Richard Hays
• Austin Farrar
• Marcus Borg

Of course, my top four will change. The first two will probably stay in place but the last two can probably be knocked out of position. And one shouldn’t think that these are all on the same level, for good or ill.

There there it is, my four.

Who are in your four? For those who didn’t follow the link to the Wilson post, I mean four whose view of Scripture you find lacking but whose observations about Scripture you have found incredibly enlightening.

Let me know, if you would:  What four men like this are you thankful to God you encountered to help you understand the Bible?

In this century, has any Christian discipline or area of scholarship caused as much in-fighting or as much distraction from actually engaging the non-christian world as Apologetics?

I don’t think there is even a close second.

A billion internet bulletin board threads tell you I am right.

In Romans 11, Paul writes,

What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened…

But then only a few sentences later he writes,

As regards the gospel, they are enemies of God for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers.

So which is it? Does elect mean chosen to have a soft and believing heart or chosen from among the nations as the covenant people of Abraham and the other patriarchs?

One could make the same comment on Paul’s use of “adoption,” which in Romans 9.6 has a collective reference to Israel, regardless of belief in the Gospel. Just previous, in Romans 8, adopt and adoption are used differently.

So what is the Pauline “definition” of election or adoption?

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