Lower left hand panel has a comment attached to The MO Presbytery report on the “Federal Vision”:

Let me make a suggestion – that you read this document and ask yourself what is NOT there. I’ll give you a start. There are no names mentioned. There is nothing about the Trinity. There is no critique of the “FV” guys understanding of the covenant. As you read through this report recognize that these omissions and more are deliberate and meaningful.

ADDENDUM: Here is a link for the report that should work.

I have no idea if I have followed any principles consistently or not, but thinking about various internet discussions and monologues makes me wonder if I couldn’t articulate some that might explain why Calvinists can respond differently to various things out there.

• Being in error is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to be properly labeled as a “dangerous teacher.” In order to be dangerous you actually have to actually be persuasive on those points. Do I go around condemning Presbyterians for quoting Spurgeon? No. Why not? Because I don’t think any Presbyterian is in danger of becoming baptist by reading him.

  So then:

  Is any PCA minister who appreciates McLaren (which is not me, as yet) squishy on homosexuality? No. McLaren’s not convincing at that point. That’s not his attraction to Evangelicals. The fact is, reading some of the attacks on McLaren teaches you nothing about why orthodox pastors and thinkers find him worth reading. This is prima facie evidenc that these attacks are misdirected.

• In appealing to those of a different tradition, tradition itself is only as good as it is prima facie derivable from Scripture. You can appeal to it in an argument with a Christian only to the extent that you can reasonably expect that Christian to see the continuity.

  So who are you trying to persuade? Bible believers or those questing for the perfect Church with the authoritative tradition, in the hope you can scoop them up before they meet a Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Anglo-Catholic?

• Appealing to a set traditinal interpretation of a Scriptural passage, when the interpretation of that passage is the point of contention, is not an appeal to Scripture; it is an appeal to tradition. Again, who are you trying to persuade?
• The Church is like Noah’s ark the way John Calvin describes the ark–as full of animals and their associated, uh, stuff (as well as the smell of it). Any claim that, if you join our special group, the smell goes away and material can be picked up off the ground and eaten because here it is all chocolate fudge is deluded. Call this the anti-utopia principle.
• Christian Pastors in your tradition who point out that stuff is not really fudge are not disloyal to your doctrinal standards nor trying to promote other traditions.
• It is, in principle, possible for non-Presbyterians to tell you something accurate about what the Bible says and how it applies.
• It is, in principle, possible for those outside the Prebyterian/Baptist Banner-of-Truth reading club to tell you something accurate about what the Bible says and how it applies.
• There is no virtue in archaic speech and terminology.
• If you try to teach the doctrine of the divine decrees by reading paragraphs 1-7 of chapter 3 of the Westminster Confession of Faith then you are in violation of paragraph 8 in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases. The Confession teaches truths we must affirm, not terms we are under obligation to use in our teaching and preaching.
• When you are caught saying something inaccurate about someone, even if your motives in making the mistake were blameless, you should promptly apologize and correct your mistake. You can move on after that. If there are other negative things to say you can say them. Admitting a mistake does not represent loss of face. It represents Christian honesty and humility. You can still preach against error. If all you can do is attack other people for pointing out your mistakes, you are going to lose your audience sooner or later. This is called the stop digging principle.
• Eventually the truth wins. If you are feeling like a loser for telling the truth, you have an opportunity to learn patience and humility rather than letting ambition guide you into the circle of the Jordan.
• Evangelicalism is full of shoddy stuff. Pointing out bad things in Evangelicalism is like hunting dairy cattle with high powered rifle and scope. It doesn’t show that you are especially skilled or discerning.
• In some cases, it might lead to lasting good if you encouraged what was best about Evangelical fads and then suggested some directions that would make things even better.

I was an MK when I was five-years-old to when I was nine-years-old.

Some of you may understand what that means, but since MK is a term used among a relatively small portion of the English-speaking population, I should, in keeping with our passage this morning, define it for you. An MK is a child of Missionaries—a “Missionary Kid”: MK.

Actually that is not quite true. Jennifer and I have a friend who lives in Florida. His parents are now overseas in Irian Jai. They have become missionaries and he is their son so, by definition, he would seem to be an MK, a missionary kid. Except he’s not. You see, you can virtually never determine the definition of a term by it’s constituent parts. You can’t say that because the kid of a person is the child of a person that thus all children of missionaries are Missionary Kids. That is not how language works. Terms are defined according to their use in a society. You can’t learn what MK means by taking what the letters stand for, Missionary Kid, and then making a deduction from what the two words mean independently of one another. You have to at least get a rather lengthy explanation from someone who has been part of a group who has used the term–say, for example, a preacher trying to begin his sermon with an illustration–or else (and this would be much better) you have to be part of a society that uses the term.

Learning a language is like learning a game. Not like learning chess where you can get a rule book and figure out the game and then play it, but more like being shoved into an area with a bunch of people with a ball and being told you will pick it up if as you go along. We learn how words are used by being shoved into a way of life.

That, incidentally, is why this passage is all about what we say in worship, as well as about what we do. The two are inextricably entangled with one another. Words and deeds are both meaningless apart from one another. I was asked by someone who was quite perceptive about the implications of what Pastor Shade was saying, “Isn’t the Word primary over the sacraments?” Well, I didn’t want to immediately answer, “Well, yes. Of course it is!” That may be justified in an ecclesiastical situation, where the ordinances of the church are done in a foreign tongue which not even the one speaking can understand. That was not an uncommon situation in the late medieval church—where even the priests were ignorant of Latin but simply had it memorized. But in our modern context what that question usually means is: “Isn’t the end all and be all of the Christian life the communication and acceptance of propositional information?” And the answer to that is no. Propositions are never intelligible apart from a context in life. We learn to speak by being brought up in a certain way of life in which words are used in a certain way. Jesus did not simply proclaim a unique verbal message, he instituted a unique covenantal community in history in which that message could be truly understood and applied. Indeed, it is just as true to say that the better we apply the Gospel, the better we understand it as it is to say the better we understand the Gospel, the better we apply it. Language and life go hand in hand.

This by the way was extremely important for Israel’s identity. Israel was a nation among other nations with both a way of life and a language. In fact, when Moses warns them of divine judgment should they depart from the faith he not only warns of foreign invaders but specifically refers to the fact that they will speak an incomprehensible language. Deuteronomy 28.49:

The LORD will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as the eagle swoops down, a nation whose language your shall not understand.

Centuries later, when Moses’ prediction is about to be carried out, Isaiah repeats this threat of an incomprehensible language when he predicts the exile in Babylon. Isaiah 28.11:

Indeed He [God] will speak to this people [Israel]
Through stammering lips and a foreign tongue.

And again when Isaiah predicts the return from exile in chapter 33, verse 19:

You will no longer see a fierce people,
A people of unintelligible speech which no one comprehends,
of a stammering tongue which no one understands.

Jeremiah, in predicting the exile, picks up on the language of Moses and Isaiah:

Behold, I am bringing a nation against you from afar, O house of Israel, declares the LORD.
It is an enduring nation,
It is an ancient nation,
A nation whose language you do not know.

The confusion of differing languages is listed as one important feature of God’s judgment on Israel. And it is an element which the Apostle Paul refers to in his explanation of the meaning (!) of the gift of tongues. Look at verses, 21 through 25:

In the Law it is written, “By men of strange tongues and by the lips of strangers I will speak to this people, and even so they will not listen to me,” says the Lord. So then tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe, but to unbelievers; but prophecy is for a sign, not to unbelievers, but to those who believe. If therefore the whole church should assemble together and all speak in tongues, and ungifted men or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad? But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an ungifted man enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all; the secrets of his heart are disclosed; and so he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you.

Now notice the seeming contradiction: Paul says in verse 22 that tongues are for unbelievers and prophecy is for believers. But then he reasons from that to what seems like the opposite position: That the unbelievers need to hear people speaking in a known language so that they can know that God is in their midst. What is going on here?

The answer is in verse 21, which explains the purpose the New Testament gift of tongues. The Holy Spirit enabling people to praise God in other tongues meant that Israel with its unique language and unique standing among the nations was no longer so unique. Tongues were a sign of judgment for unbelieving Jews. It meant the word of God was now being spoken among the nations.

That, by the way, would explain why the church in Corinth might have had a special place for tongues which we don’t find in any of the other cities. Acts 18.7 tells us that the first Corinthian congregation was next door to the synagogue. Tongues would have been then, for unbelievers, Israelite unbelievers.

But Paul is concerned about both other kinds of unbelievers—gentile unbelievers—and even other kinds of Christians—those not versed in the Corinthian view of Spiritual gifts. Remember, in verse 16 Paul wants the “ungifted” person to say “Amen” to the “thanksgiving” he or she hears in the worship service. Obviously, only a Christian can sincerely answer “Amen” to the giving of thanks to the true God. This could simply refer to anyone in the congregation who doesn’t understand the message. But the Apostle Paul seems to have more in mind. In verse 23, as I just read, he points out that both the ungifted and the unbelievers will respond to a typical Corinthian worship service by thinking that the Corinthians are insane.

The kind of person to whom Paul is probably referring here is a Christian from some other church, such as Ephesus, or Galatia, or somewhere who, because he’s in town on the Lord’s day, looks up the local Corinthian assembly in order to worship God. Apparently Corinthian worship would be nothing like what he expected. In fact, it would look like madness. Thus, Paul’s explanation and implied exhortation in verse 33, where he gives his reasoning for demanding order and intelligibility in church worship: “for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.”

I BEGAN THIS SERMON mentioning that I was an MK in Liberia, West Africa, but I never really finished my thought. In Liberia, there was no real point in leaning the native language. Even though it was a very small country it contained many many languages. In some places, you could literally find a different language spoken every two miles. Why? Because tribalism and tribal warfare gave rise to differing ways of life and thus differing languages. Idiosyncratic societies maintain and increase their isolation by developing their own language and culture. That is what was going on in Corinth both in its worship and speech and even apart from miraculous gifts that is what can still go on today.

Paul is exhorting the Corinthians to decide how they will speak and how they will worship with an eye to how these things will affect other Christians and unbelievers. Will they build up the Church or will they tear it down? He doesn’t want the Christians in Corinth becoming fragmented from the rest of the Christian world. He doesn’t want the Corinthian Church to become isolated from the Church universal.

This occurs on an individual level as well in the context of public worship. If public worship is simply an occasion for each person to engage in what personally satisfies his own perceived needs, then he is cut off from all the rest. He is like a child with his own private babbling. Thus Paul’s rebuke in verse 20, which must have been quite a blow to the Corinthians who thought of themselves as so spiritually advanced: “Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be babes, but in your thinking be mature.”

WHAT I THINK IS most surprising about this passage is the basic criticism which the Apostle Paul levels against tongue-speaking as opposed to prophecy. Look at verse 2:

For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God, for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries. But one who prophesies speaks to me for edification and exhortation and consolation.

Do you get that? The problem with tongue-speaking is that it is too God-centered! For public worship that’s not enough. Corporate worship involves building up the body–edifying the church. If you don’t do that you’re not worshiping the right way.

This really shouldn’t surprise us, if you think about it. Consider how the Apostle Paul has reasoned with the Corinthians throughout this letter. A couple of chapters earlier, Paul quite deliberately called the Church, Christ. That is a breathtaking use of the Lord’s name and it entails that serving our Lord Jesus Christ entails in that very act serving the Church–serving one another.

And remember, the Apostle Paul has pretty much said that. When he introduces the topic of eating meat offered to idols in chapter 8, Paul appeals to the traditional Hebrew confession of monotheism but redefines so that Christ is included as Lord and God. And then he moves from Christ to the brother for whom Christ died. If we all know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified, then we will realize that our loyalty to God demands service to one another.

He concludes his discussion of idol-meat at the end of chapter 10 on the same note. Doing all to the glory of God means giving no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God. It means pleasing all men in all things, not seeking one’s own profit, but the profit of the many.

And here we have the same principle applied to a different issue. Appropriate corporate worship involves speaking not only to God, but to the edification to all present. Appropriate corporate worship involves even restraining your own gifts for the sake of good order and decency for others.

BUT THAT IS NOT enough. Paul doesn’t stop with a concern for the ungifted but he actually tells us that we must be concerned for the unbeliever. Our words and actions need to be intelligible to non-Christians.

Now, at one level, this shouldn’t surprise us that much. After all, God edifies the church–builds up the church–by changing unbelievers into proper bricks for the edifice. But while that concern would tell us about the need for evangelism, it wouldn’t give us a mandate for how we do worship.

But there is another reason why worship has to be aimed at the benefit of the unbeliever. It can be found in Paul’s paraphrase of Isaiah 28.11:

In the Law it is written, “By men of strange tongues and by the lips of strangers I will speak to this people, and even so they will not listen to me,” says the Lord.

Do you understand the incredible point being made? God says that in the mouths of foreign invaders coming to destroy Israel, his word is being sent forth. That’s what happened in the exile. It happened literally in the book of Daniel, a great portion of which is not written in Hebrew but in Aramaic. It was also happening during the New Testament period. It happened in the Gospels when men from Galilee, a backwater area which was almost Gentile itself, claimed to have the keys of the kingdom which the Judeans and the Jerusalemites and the Priests thought belonged to them. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus wept because Jerusalem would not recognize that in him they were being visited by God. And it happened all over the Mediterranean world when Gentiles would embrace the Gospel and the Jews would not. They were visited by God from the outside. That’s always the problem with covenant community: Judgment begins in the House of God. And when it comes, it comes from the outside. God plays the part of a thief in the night.

All this does not only apply to Old Testament Israel; it applies to the church in Corinth. They need to realize that just as God was speaking through the pagans to the Hebrews, so God may be approaching them through the unbelievers around them. If they are content to prevent themselves from being understood by simply pleasing themselves and their own ideas of spirituality, if they a self-referential language and culture which no one else can break into, then they are quite possibly spurning God himself. Paul does not hesitate to identify himself with the weak because that is the pattern of Jesus Christ and him crucified. It is no great leap to realize that God identifies himself with the ungifted and even the unbeliever. God is the outsider. When we keep others out we can be keeping him out.

And we don’t necessarily do it intentionally. It can happen gradually. We become slightly isolated and we begin developing in relation to no one but ourselves. We begin speaking our own terminology and manifesting a distinctive culture which increases our isolation–increases the difficulty for outsiders to approach us. And then we become slightly more isolated. And the change continues.

And if God loves us, he will visit us. He will not allow that cycle to continue. He will destroy all the things that have become so comfortable to us, and our hopes and dreams of that continued comfort, which we are so sure is the measure of true spirituality, and he will force us into the company of people we would never have considered allowing into our cozy community. Sanctification requires strange bedfellows.

This incidentally, applies to entire broad traditions. Go study the Bible with a knowledgeable Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox believer, or a dispensationalist or a Lutheran. You will get quite perplexed out how he understands Scripture. He knows all your prooftexts. He knows the Bible. But he has been using the passages differently and been among a people who use the passages differently. Actually, disproving a believer in another tradition is much more difficult than you realize.

Let me ask you something? What would happen if we gained enough new converts in the next year to add half or double the size of the congregation? What would happen? What would our “community” look like? I promise you–it won’t look like anything you have been used to.

A few years ago I preached on Judges 3 and used this handout (.pdf). I thought some of you might find it interesting.

By the way, I didn’t go through this from the pulpit or anything like that. I don’t think that sort of analysis leads to the sort of exhortation that preaching is supposed to be. But I asserted that the Word of God was a central emphasis in the text and built on that idea. Instead of arguing for the premise to the sermon, I provided this for those who might have had questions.

Baby Tossed Into Lake Represents Broader Epidemic

Daniel sent me a link to this article. It is amazing (and probably not true in many places). My favorite section:

So why did Fox kill Firefly so deliberately? Did they want to punish creator Joss Whedon for his “unexpected” successes with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel? Demonstrate to him conclusively that it is not the few genuinely creative people in Hollywood who hold the real power in the industry, but the men and women who hold the purse strings?

Long ago I reached the conclusion that the medieval system of patronage, whatever its faults and drawbacks, was infinitely superior to the modern “market” system of “free-enterprise” for encouraging the creation of lasting works of literature and art. I put these in quotes because market economics is only a tool, and hence is only as good—or bad—as those who wield it. A society of intelligent, thoughtful individuals could, no doubt, produce the highest art ever known to man through a market economy. A society of lowest-common-denominator swine, sheep, slaves and mindless, pap-programmed robots could only, I submit to you, produce the kind of utter dreck that is foisted on gullible audiences today as “entertainment,” and for which the swine, sheep, slaves and robots are only too eager to pay, and, by so doing, to support its continuance.

Bear in mind that medieval society was likewise comprised of swine, sheep and slaves (they didn’t have the John Dewey-style system of “public education” in those days required to turn out the robots), so that the system of patronage actually could work; rich aristocrats who genuinely had an interest in the arts could selectively choose who to support and who not to with a taste and consideration which, clearly, the vaunted “common man” of any age is incapable.

But now this hints at another problem with Firefly, and which may have contributed to its undoing. This was an uncommon show, aimed at uncommon people….

[RANT ON]

OK, last post today; I promise.

Remember when you first met your wife, and fell in love with her? Remember your heartrate? Remember the difficulty breathing? Remember the shakes?

Do you dare presume to think you’ve had a richer emotional experience than God? Do you think God doesn’t know what it’s like to fall in love? You think the crazy sick feeling is original with you?

And something else.

Ever been a day when you feel on top of the world and the weather is gorgeous and traffic is easy and you come home whistling (I can’t whistle, but you probably can) and you walk into the kitchen (or whatever room you walk into) and your wife is sitting slumped crying her eyes out because of something you don’t know about? Do you stay happy? Does your emotional state not change?

And is not God rejoicing when you rejoice and then, when you encounter something new and sad, weeping when you weep? Is the way you react to your wife’s emotional state with your own corresponding emotions something unique to you and alien to God?

If Christians think only creatures can emphatize with them no wonder so many pray to the saints.

Jesus is not an exception to God but a revelation of him. God is emotional. God loves and hates and does it in response to events and the plights of his people. He gets provoked to anger though he is long-suffering. I’ve heard more than one good explanation as to what it means to say God is without passions. If it means he lacks emotions then it is just wrong.

If you associate emotions in God with free will theism, you will only drive many into free will theism. People who read their Bibles know that God is passionate about them is fully engaged in their circumstances. God isn’t Deism + divine concurrence. He’s more like Dionysus.

The fact that God is transcendant over all is an odd excuse for disbelieving what he tells you about his feelings.

[RANT OFF]

I read some seventeenth-century Reformed theologians arguing that because baptism is effective it must be more than a seal. I read others arguing (against Socinians) that baptism is effective because it is a seal, not just a sign.

Someone needs to wade through the literature and give us a dissertation on this. As it stands now, I don’t understand how anyone can claim to speak for the whole of Reformed theology and say what it means for the sacraments to be seals.

To offer a different way of writing Reformed book reviews, here is John Barach’s take on the book.

Of course, I haven’t watched every show out there. Stargate remains a complete unknown to me, for example.

And sci-fi is so vast a field that it really is implausible to put them all in one group. The X-files was nothing like Star Trek at all (thankfully). Star Wars and Gattaca…. it seems wrong to even put their names in the same sentence [in case that is not clear: it is demeaning to Gattaca]. Dark Angel could be labeled many things. It is post-apocalyptic, but nothing like Mad Max or any of those things. Most of the show’s great aspects could be put in a private-eye drama with a contemporary setting.

Some of my attraction to the show is rather idiosyncratic. I was pastoring in Auburn, Washington when it first aired and I caught maybe the first five shows. Dark Angel is set in Seattle (filmed somewhere in or near Vancouver BC). The Northwest feel both in sets and in rural locations is quite authentic..

The Seattle of the show is a “post-pulse” Seattle. Terrorists set off a nuclear warhead that was too high up to do a great deal of damage but sent out an electromagnetic pulse that wiped out all the computers in the (at least Western half) of the US. This triggered an economic meltdown which, in turn, destroyed the US as a unified entity. While it is still held together under some sort of national leadership, the idea of states are gone. The local governments are pretty much military bases which are able to get away with a lot of corruption. Hoverbots patrol Seattle and our protagonists “squat” illegally in an abandoned building, paying “rent” to the local cop who drops by on patrol and radios in that there is no one in the structure.

But before the pulse, in the forests of Wyoming, there was (and still is we find out) a secret base known as Manticore. Throught a combination of genetic engineering, psychological programming, and regimented training from infancy, crop after crop of “supersoldiers” were raised as their own unit/family taught to follow any order. At one point, shortly before the pulse, a dozen of these X-5s escaped.

Max was one of them.

She now wears her hair long enough to cover the barcode on the back of her neck (removing it at a tatoo parlor only works for a couple of weeks before it reappears). She is a bike courier by day and a burglar by night, trying to avoid detection on the part of the government/military agents that want to get their “kids” back.

In Seattle there is also a rogue reporter–the eyes only streaming freedomcast–who has found a way to hack into all broadcasts untracably (this may be the most unbelievable part of the whole scenario) and report on the real news hidden by the banana-republic powers-that-be. His identity is secret but Max meets him when she breaks into his penthouse apartment to steal. He slowly gets her to abandon her amoral survival-instinct-led life and take chances on helping others.

What makes the show is Max’s hard-boiled attitude, both in conversation and in voice-over monologue, that is combined with outbreaks of great emotion. I think if I had seen the script I would have doubted anyone could pull it off without sounding fake, but Jessica Alba pulled it off (and was much more interesting than she was in the Fantastic Four, no surprise). There are plenty of thin plots where her secrets and those of Eyes Only should have been revealed to the world. But entertaining TV shows have contained worse problems. These are probably only noticeable because the show naturally leads you to expect higher standards (if Buffy the Vampire Slayer wasn’t understood as campy, would any of us really take it seriously?).

That parenthetical off-the-cuff mandates I say more, I guess. I suppose it was natural that in 2000 people would compare the show to Buffy because they both involve superheroines. Almost all such comparisons would be superficial since DA is a much more serious sci-fi show (the fact that both BtVS and DA are sci-fi is more evidence of the uselessness of the genre; the genre has no reason to exist other than to allow some people to feel too important to participate in it…). But one comparison does stand. Buffy’s survival record has a good deal to do with her rejection of a loneliness and insistence on staying close to friends. Max has a similar commitment, even though at one level it endangers her, it also allows her to de-soldierize despite Manticore’s comprehensive brainwashing and get reprogrammed through socialization. We see some interesting (and sad) glimpses of what happened to the rest of Max’s “family” of refugees and how they did or didn’t escape the internal hold of Manticore.

I could say more, but I’ll stop here. It was truly a great season. I understand that the second season was not nearly as well done, but I’ve never seen it so I can say nothing first hand.

(By the way, I am not recommending the show for children not only due to language, but also because Max’s friend Original Cindy is an out Lesbian. The good news is that the show only descends into soft-porn conventions [i.e she makes out briefly with a girlfriend] in one episode. The rest are pretty tame).

(One other thing: it is funny to see how the present has surpassed the near-future scenario. The flatscreens are all as thick as my iMac and there is not a USB port in sight. Everything is connected with big clunky cables and multi-prong outlets. The rotary phones are there on purpose, but the rest is simply an outdated set.)