Category Archives: Uncategorized

The report so far 01

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OK, I’d like some interaction if I’ve missed anything, because I am busy with stuff, even though I decided to take some time to start the report.

First, I’ve read I. A. 1 on Election in the Westminster Standards.  I don’t see anything wrong with it.  It is standard Reformed theology.  I have to say that if the report is going to claim that anyone in the PCA disagrees with this, I hope they prove their case because I’m highly capable.

(Perhaps they don’t make such a claim.  I just searched for the word “arminian” and didn’t find it.  So, if we’re not Arminians then we should all be calvinists and the reports material on election and Westminster is common ground for all of us, right?)

More later

Quickie observations on exile, death, curse, punishment, and resurrection

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  1. God told Adam and Eve that the day they disobeyed in the garden they would die.
  2. The day Adam and Eve disobeyed they did not literally die, they were exiled from the Garden.
  3. When God formed Israel out of Egypt into a nation he had them build what was obviously a symbolic garden.
  4. When Israel sinned, by going after other gods, they were sent into exile and the garden/temple was destroyed
  5. Being brought back into the Land from exile was prophesied as resurrection from death (Isaiah 26; Ezekiel 37)
  6. When Jesus was condemned, it was to die under the domination of a foreign power; even the tomb was marked out as foreign territory by the imperial seal.  Though in Jerusalem, Jesus death and burial were plainly exile.
  7. There is no exegetically responsible way to deny that the sentence imposed by God in the Garden (Genesis 3) or the exile of Israel from the Land was anything less than a punshment for sin.
  8. The return from exile is a revelation of the forgiveness of sins (Isaiah 40).
  9. Jesus undergoing “exile” cannot be played off against Jesus suffering the penalty that we deserved.
  10. Jesus’ condemnation and death were punishment for sin–this is not some “model” of anything.  It is not a Roman or Feudal culture imposed on anything.  It is the truth.
  11. Incidentally, Christus Victor is also true.  So what?  It contradicts nothing in 1-10.

Now all you have is trust

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This is absolutely wonderful. Remember the catch-up intro to L O S T presented in the middle of season two? It seems so close: “Is it possible to live by faith alone?” In case no one clicks on the link to read the S. G. de Graaf quotation I shamelessly rip it off here:

Man now had to learn to live by faith: our sin and the misery in the world had made it appear that man could expect no favor from God. To be sure, man had also lived by faith in Paradise, but then his belief made perfect sense. After the fall, man had to live by faith alone. God drove man out of Paradise and appointed an angel to guard the way to the tree of life. At that point the trials of life by faith alone began. All the same, man still enjoyed the privilege of faith in God’s continued favor.

Bob’s fame gets extended

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Well, I wasn’t the only person who noticed Bob’s opinion piece about guns.  The Brady campaign against the Second Amendment has weighed in.

Rather than focus on the challenges of domestic abuse or the problems that occur when someone in a bad relationship can easily get a gun, columnist Bob Allen on Wednesday decided that the blame for tragedies like these should be placed on people who “cannot carry a weapon… without asking permission of the government.”

Typical.  How many studies have to show that armed populations are safer, not only from dangerous criminals but from government agents?  Every time an anecdote is used, government gun monopolists are going to pretend that “gun pushers” have nothing but anecdotal evidence.

Not just James

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When people ask, “How is James using the word justified?” Or “faith?” etc, they are inadvertantly missing the point.  The question is not, “How did James use the word?” but “How did James and all his intended readers use the word?”

James was writing a pastoral letter to warn and encourage.  It would make no sense whatsoever if he decided to use words in a highly idiosyncratic way.  No, he used the common language of his audience.  Everyone in the church spoke that way about justification and faith.

Getting the Gospel Right

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Doug Wilson writes:

I agree that imputation is an important part of how this tree grows and flourishes, and I agree that N.T. Wright gums up this doctrine. I believe he is wrong at this point, and his Reformed critics are right. But this is not enough to get me yelling for his scalp because on other aspects of the gospel, he is right and many of his Reformed critics are wrong. We make a great deal (as we should) about how Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. But what was it, exactly, that Abraham believed? It was that his seed would be like the stars in their multitudinous glory, and Paul interprets this as meaning Abraham was going to inherit the world — not through the law but through the righteousness of faith (Rom. 4:13). N.T. Wright believes this to be true, just like Abraham did, and (I really hesitate to say this, honestly) his amillennial Reformed critics do not believe it. This proclamation to Abraham was a proclamation of the gospel, and many within the Reformed camp do not believe it.

Paul doesn’t just write this way in Romans 4.13. Galatians 3.8 shows Paul saying something extraordinarily similar:

And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.”

The content of the Gospel preached to Abraham, which he believed, was “In you shall all the nations be blessed.”

What follows in Galatians Three is not a contrast between condisional and unconditional promises, but the content of the Law which specifies one nation and the content of the promise which specifies all nations.

And that is also the Gospel according to Ephesians 3