Reformed Dude

Shooby Dooby Doo

2012-02-13T10:06:00.000-08:00

John Frame is famous for approaching everything in triads. He calls it being triperspectival. The first triad I was ever exposed to (before Frame) was in Education class, namely 'Know-Be-Do'. This related to teaching in that we don't simply want our student to acquire information, but to be changed by it and then act differently because of it. This can also be expressed as "What? So what? Now what?". Education in the West has focused almost exclusively on "What/Know" for some time now. Here at grad school, it is to be expected that a majority of persons present would be "knowers".

I should've remembered this lesson when presented a riddle in Leading Worship Class, but I didn't.

I can't remember how it related to anything we were discussing, so now is the right time to bring it up! For whatever reason, Dr. Farley mentioned his diagnosis the other day, that vibrant churches are either "Music-Word" churches or "Word-Sacrament" churches. This was a new thought to him, so he had no judgment or reproach for either yet, only a caution that we discern our church's nature as soon as possible.

A Music-Word church has 30 minutes (or more) followed by a sermon. Because they are a healthy church, they recognize the necessity of both, even is some prefer one of the other. "We need to worship God with our whole being. This means emotions aren't unhealthy, but we need the Word too. We are neither vapid nor heady." I've even managed to find a Music-Word church or two that takes weekly communion, but, honestly, it feels kind of 'tacked on'. It's not congruous with the church's personality, but they've become convinced of the necessity of it. As a stereotype, Music-Word churches predominate in the Black community and in more Charismatic settings.

A Word-Sacrament church sings songs too, but they are usually hymns. More often than not, one song is not followed by another, but some explanation/speech intercedes between them. The devolved form of this is usually to regard the whole worship service as prelude and postlude to the sermon. But, of course, that's not true, so the Lord's Supper supplies the counter-balance. These people are among the first to rediscover the joy of the Eucharist, as a time of fellowship and personal communion. Another of the churches I've tried lately fits the bill. No matter how hard the worship leader tries to add spice to the music, it is 'tacked on' and not fundamental to the church's identity. The liveliest of Lutheran, Presbyterian and even Roman Catholic churches fall under this category.

* * *

As we drove to church on Sunday, I tried figuring out if this is the way it always has to be, and if so, which one would I choose. My journey has been from Music-Word churches to Word-Sacrament churches, over the years. But I've rediscovered Music-Word in the last few months, and found it better matches my personality. I wrestled with the appearently necessary split, chalking it up to incompatibility. And then Know-Be-Do Kenobi enlightened me upside the head.

Word (in both Music-Word and Word-Sacrament) is Knowledge. Sacrament is Do and Music is Be. The first Sunday we went to New City Fellowship, my wife said, "There is a world of difference between White people singing a 7-11 song (the same 7 words 11 times) and Black people singing a repetitive song!" Typically, White people want to learn something new (Know) or Do something! Just 'being' is hard for us. I can't tell you how many times my mother has said to me, "You can't be somebody you're not." But that's not true. God asks us to become something more, something different that what we are all the time. "Be ye holy as I am holy".

But my theory is true, then there ought to be "Be-Do" churches out there. And there are. "Music-Sacrament" churches predominate among Evangelical Catholics and Eastern Orthodoxes. In those contexts, a sermon might be 10 minutes and feels 'tacked on', i.e. not part of the necessary core of the church's identity. Error can, of course, creep in on churches that don't emphasize 'Know', but that's also been the case in our Reformed and Evangelical circles, perhaps to a worse degree.

Application
So what are we do in our own churches? (I just tipped my hand as a Word-Sacrament guy: this blog post consists solely of a Know and a Do section!) We must recognize our natural giftings. My denomination demands Masters degrees from all ministers, so we are plainly Knowers. At worst, that's all we are. When we respond to the push to not be so monomaniacal, we expand our repertoire into 'Doing', e.g. the Sacraments. The last thing on our last is Being.
Sitting in two classes with Jerram Barrs this semester has taught me many things already. The first of which was to close my computer, put down my pen, and struggle not to think up ways I am going to implement what I'm learning in my 400 different contexts. It is very hard, but I try to just let his words and mannerisms change who I am. As a White boy, it feels very unnatural! But he is doing it. What ways can you branch out from your comfortable corner of the Know-Be-Do triangle? And how are you going to get that third piece in there too?

Antinomies

2012-02-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

Michael Bird has an excellent post critiquing Martyn's Galatians commentary. It's a very good analysis and the first commenter links to his dissertation from DTS on salvation history too. Well worth your time, especially if -- like me -- you think dialecticism doesn't have to be Barthian.

Biblical Inerrancy

2012-01-01T20:20:00.000-08:00

On those occasions when Scripture does affirm something, the affirmation is true. Thus, we may continue to hold to inerrancy while at the same time acknowledging that Scripture does many other things besides assert. Logically, however, infallibility is prior to inerrancy. God's Word invariably accomplishes its purpose (infallibility); and when this purpose is assertion, the proposition of the speech act is true (inerrancy).

Kevin Vanhoozer, "The Semantics of Biblical Literature", p.95, cited in James Emery White, "What is Truth?", p.203

No Fun

2011-12-22T19:13:00.001-08:00

It's not a nice time to be Presbyterian. The mainline denomination is hemorrhaging worse than a Triple-A and the conservative bunch is having a Cold Civil War. I am out here, getting some very antithetical signals from two very different sides. Some people are leaving seminary because they say it is abandoning the Reformed faith. There are some like them on the outside who say if someone stays here then he is guaranteeing himself that he cannot be ordained in half the country.
Let me pause for two seconds and tell you how scary that is! I can honestly say that I still cling to the mantra, "Whatever that Bible says, that's what I want to believe" and not either party's line. But no one is preparing me for what I see as the coming conflagration: my ordination exam before presbytery! There are lots of good people here, but sometimes I feel like this:

I think what made me the most uncomfortable at first was a certain attitude amongst professors that seemed a bit "devil may care" and impetuous towards more conservative Confessional positions, without a willingness to be gentle in their approach. It was literally "open your brain, take out what you know, and put in what we are telling you" that seemed dismissive of any gut reactions their own attitudes might be challenging.
However, that being said, I have found that many of these professors seem to be reacting against hard line positions that I have grown to believe rightly merit some challenging. Because of harsh opposition they have encountered, they seem to think anyone asking a humble question is trying to "zing" them. Many of these men have been accused of heresy by people who really know nothing of their actual teaching, and they have grown defensive. With time, and a persistently humble attitude, I have always been able to convince the professors of my honest desire to understand what they are teaching, rather than attempting to trap them into saying something I can blog about later. With that level of trust, I have had some really helpful conversations, and have felt convinced of their fully orthodox beliefs.
I also have more "conservative" friends from the @@@ who are very critical of ***, but I have felt that with time I am more comfortable with the attitude here than at other schools I considered attending. (When I was deciding on a seminary, ### was my other main consideration.) To be frank, when I visited ###, I felt that perhaps an unhealthy level of reliance was placed on the WC, without enough focus on finding the theology in Scripture. The attitude I have encountered at *** has seemed over time to be a very high value on the Confessions, but finding the theology first in Scripture. Honestly, that is a position I would rather hold. I would rather be able to ground my understanding of the Lord's Supper for example on Scripture itself, than simply quote the relevant section of the Confession. Sometimes I felt that in more "conservative" circles, the confession was cited first, and then only later if necessary, the Scriptures.

That was a dude I know who graduated from here not too long ago. Since I am "blogging about it later", I should be sure to include that I came here because I think these men are right, insofar as I can tell and with regards to what (little) I know.
Most of my colleagues are 25 year old dudes who recently graduated from college and don't know about the firestorm afoot these days. Their ordination exams will be battlegrounds for a war they don't know about and a few of them will be casualties of a conflict of which they are presently unaware. I am aware and could use some wisdom is side stepping all the land mines. A big part of that is learning disarmament techniques now!

Righteousness and Obedience

2011-11-21T11:47:00.001-08:00

The NPP also present a palpable attempt to better understand the relationship between righteousness and obedience in Paul's letters. By stressing the forensic nature of justification, reformed theology has always had a propensity to bruise the nerve that connects faith with obedience. Catholic and Wesleyan objections to a strictly forensic definition of justification as fostering antinomianism are legitimate. Ben Witherington writes: "If God were simply to impute to believers his righteousness, then there would be no basis to require righteousness of them after their conversion." One solution is to posit justification as being transformative so that justification includes declaring and making righteous, forgiving and renewing. Yet if justification includes both declaring righteous and making righteous, it renderes virtually incomprehensible the charge of antinomianism leveled against Paul in Romans 3:7-8 and 6:1-2. I would contend that moral sanctification (to use a theological term) cannot be absorbed under the aegis of justification, but neither can they be separated. For Paul, justification and transformation are linked logically rather than conceptually. In order to avoid misunderstanding, those of the reformed tradition would do well to accentuate the effective nature of justification whereby obedience, faithfulness, righteousness and love are imperatives that grow out of a saving faith. This is not an innovation by any means; commentators have been saying such things for centuries. As Calvin wrote:

We dream not of a faith which is devoid of good works, not of a justification which can exist without them: the only difference is, that while we acknowledge that faith and works are necessarily connected, we, however, place justification in faith not works ... Thus it appears how true it is that we are justified not without, and yet not by works, since in the participation in Christ, by which we are justified, is contained not less sanctification than justification. (Institutes 3.16.1)

What this means is that justification cannot be separated from the transforming power of the Spirit bequeathed to those whom are "in-Christ".

Michael F. Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God, p110-111

Mohler on Meta-Narrative

2011-11-21T09:35:00.001-08:00

Back in March, Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological seminary, gave the Gaffin Lecture on theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. There is a long bit at the beginning where he praises WTS, but then he begins with an Oliver Wendel Holmes quote:

"I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity."

He then walks through the dizzying complex history of modernity and the abysmal attempts of Christians to come to the simplicity on the far-side of complexity. One example is Fundamentalism (as the term is used today) is an attempt to go backwards, to pretend the complexity didn't just happen. He calls Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy simply to be hyper-Neo-Orthodox. But there we're two critiques which I found especially close to home. I am attached to two institutions at present, which I found described perfectly in succession, herein. That is, at least in regard to how their students proceed after graduation.

"Emerging church ... they're saying you can basically have something on the other side of complexity and it can be something pretty cool, but you're going to have to surrender the cognitive claims, you're going to have to make it all narrative and theo-drama and surrender the cognitive content.
Another failed rescue attempt is what we call Evangelicalism. ... The reduction of evangelicalism to a para-church movement which is largely now a form of mass-cult, consumer religion, non-confessional, experiential and pragmatic ... didn't rescue either. ... Moralistic, therapeutic Deism."

Mohler's Ph.D. is in Barth vs. Van Til, and you cannot imagine him saying what he says apart from Van Tillian Presuppositionalism. More and more, I am seeing that as the only unshakable system and the center of my theologizing. Narrative-based theology is biblical, but decidedly pre-modern. As I learned from D.A. Carson, Van Tillianism has much in common with the worldview pre-Descartes, but theo-drama is no means by which we can identify and combat heresy. Systematic Theology provides us with an unsatisfying meta-narrative. Biblical Theology cannot address subtle, yet deadly error. But we can no more do away with one or the other then we can walk without two legs.

I encourage anyone with some tertiary education to listen to the Mohler lecture.

Science Today

2011-09-29T17:39:00.001-07:00

“Thus, the entire discussion of the evolutionary basis of human sexual preference is a made-up story, from beginning to end. Yet it is a story that appears in textbooks, in courses in high schools and universities, and in popular books and journals. It bears the legitimacy given to it by famous professors and by national and international media. It has the authority of science. In an important sense, it is science because science consists not simply of a collection of true facts about the world, but is the body of assertions and theories about the world made by people who are called scientists. It consists, in large part, of what scientists say about the world whatever the true state of the world might be.
“Science is more than an institution devoted to the manipulation of the physical world. It also has a function in the formation of consciousness about the political and social world. Science in that sense is part of the general process of education, and the assertions of scientists are the basis for a great deal of the enterprise of forming consciousness. Education in general, and scientific education in particular, is meant not only to make us competent to manipulate the world but also to form our social attitudes.”
- Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, by R.C. Lewontin, leading geneticist and chair of zoology at Harvard

Solomon among the Postmoderns

2011-09-19T09:49:00.001-07:00

Solomon among the Postmoderns by Peter J. Leithart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It has been difficult to find time to fit in such a dense book while reading for seminary, but it has been worth it!

I've often read on Leithart's blog things which struck me as particular pro-Postmodernism, but I always wrote that off as blind ignorance on my part. Hence, I was bowled over by the stance of this book: Peter is basically a Christian Postmodern!

My entire take on Modernism vs Postmodernism (vs. Premodernism/Van Tillianism) began with a D.A. Carson lecture series at E.T.S. in 2004. Those talks changed my life, but in them Carson does what Leithart accuses all Anti-Postmodern Christians (APC's) of doing: assuming that Postmoderns are attempting to build an epistemology. The APC's then go on to show that such epistemologies are defective and bankrupt: case close, Postmodernism is bad, we can all go home. Leithart will have none of it.
Peter argues that Postmodernism is a strand within Modernism, present from the beginning and containing benefits and pitfalls just like every other man-made worldview. The Modernists' great error is pride, assuming that human beings can know everything. Postmoderns are not their polar-opposites (assuming human being can't know anything). Instead, the missing, sanctifying piece is eschatology.
Primarily though quotes and better translations of Ecclesiastes than we normally read, Leithart shows that Solomon was primarily a Postmodern in his tearing down of human institutions and supposed ultimate knowledge. What separates him from Derrida is having an end to the story. If the meaning of any one thing can be changed by later things, then an open universe deprives all things of any final meaning. Peter says Derrida is right, except that there is an ending to the One Story.

If you can handle the heaviness, then this is a great book.

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Theological Triangulation

2011-09-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to hold to a tertium quid in the intramural debates among the Reformed? I hold this to be as impossible as attempting to triangulate with only two points. And yet that is precisely what I think a certain secondary educational institution is doing. I met with one important leader who confirmed just that. Allow me to walk you through what I mean.

Almost everyone comes to this school with a provincial, parochial take on what it is to be Reformed, Evangelical, even Christian. The mandatory first semester class (which I managed to avoid quite yet) is designed specifically to disrupt, dislodge and dislocated any and all such idiosyncrasies and subject them to public scrutiny and examination. Rather than attempting to persuade anyone of a particular point of view, the express aim is to make the student aware of the broad spectrum of acceptable, Reformed opinions, and tolerant of them all.

For example, a friend of mine disclosed to me his great unease with what he was being taught in regards to Old Testament Theology. He had come from a group who holds up John Sailhamer as the Gold Standard of how to do OT studies. What my friend was being taught in class seemed close, but significantly different from Sailhamer. My friend was concerned, even worried. As a true friend and a nerd, I read Intro to OT Theology in an evening and reported back that Sailhamer's conclusions were close to the main of Reformed Theology, but that his methods and gripes placed significant distance between him and the leaders in the field, as deemed by my Westminster Theological Seminary-shaped mind. The next day, several professors here declared Sailhamer to be quite wrong in much of his ideology.
My friend emerged from this brouhaha wiser and more informed than he was before. He also amended his position -- taking some significant departures from Sailhamer, but also seeing where he is going to be in disagreement with his professors. He went through three distinct stages in his perspectival journey

He began in a provincial, narrow view.
I persuaded him of a different view, on Biblical and exegetical grounds.
He attained a "bird's eye view" (or at least part of one) by seeing where he was in contrast to where he had been.

I am contending that it is impossible to get to 3 without going through 2. In other words, you can't achieve perspective without arriving at a new point of view first. If you attempt to shortcut from 1 to 3, you will be heard (in our relativistic day and age) as espousing a pluralism of epistemology and ultimately an invalidation of the idea of absolute truth.

D.A. Carson taught me that tolerance has been bastardized over time. In the Modern philosophical air of Descartes and Leibniz, the term connoted a patient endurance with those who one knew to be wrong, that is, simply waiting for them to be disabused by the accumulation of facts. But in the Post-Modern times of Kant and Nietzsche, the parable of Nathan the Wise holds sway. In it, Lessing contented that everything is equally valid or invalid and that only pragmatism should decide matters not immediately resolvable. We tolerate everyone, and the only intolerable person is the one who is intolerant of our toleration. Now the term means "nobody is right or wrong" so don't say anything.

When professors tells kids that a multitude of answers are "acceptable" without strongly arguing for the rightness of one particular answer, they automatically engender the worst kind of tolerance, because it is in the air we are breathe. I chose to come here because I am academically persuaded that tolerance (of the best kind) is Biblically right. In Romans 14 and 15, in the midst of Paul discussion about tolerance, he is careful never to relinquish the absolute "rightness" of his side over against the "weaker" brethren. Instead, he says it is incumbent upon all believers not to let issues apart from the Gospel divide them. This is the trespass of certain other institutions, not in teaching exact views, but in failing to be tolerant (in the old sense) of others who are wrong. I want to know the right answer. And one of the right answers is to be tolerant of those who are wrong.

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical RevolutionFrom Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

2011-09-05T10:49:00.001-07:00

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution by Peter J. Leithart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an beautiful book, though not really a complete one. However, this is appropriate to the status quo in Reformed Liturgics. We have been very lax in this area for a long time, and so others (with whom we disagree sharply in theology) have lead the way. Peter J. Leithart is breaking new ground for Presbyterians, but he thoughts are not fully formed, probably because the community of our faithful who ponder these issues is so small.

Proceeding backwards, he ends the book with some implications about the Regulative Principle. While agreeing in spirit, he argues against a strict "subscription" to it, and appeals to David's liturgical reformed in 1 Chronicles for support. The argument is convincing. (I mean, strict Regulative Principle adherence among the Puritans lead to canceling Christmas!)
A further principle to remember is the whole-Bible-basis for such discussions. There is not theology of worship in the NT, but there is not reason not to value the OT in this regard. Those who do otherwise are functional Dispensationalists. Leithart goes beyond this, however, and moves into what I would call allegorical (he would say typological) reasoning. His defense of this in Deep Exegesis convinced me 90%, and the same remains true here.

The second to last chapter, shows very convincingly that Amos 9:11-12 are speaking of the unique time in Redemptive History when David brought the ark up from the house of Obed-Edom and had it dwell in a special tent on Mt. Zion for a generation before the construction of the tabernacle. This has NT implications because Amos is quoted at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. Many Davidic Psalms are improved by Leithart's understanding. And he provides thoughtful prods in a post-mill direction which are well received.

Prior to this, he walked through the precise ways in which David "innovated" worship. Actually, these are all proofs for who David stayed within the Law, but only because it was never a straight-jacket but a rule-book for our good. Again going backward, Dr. Leithart shows that the Ark went a progress through Gentiles, before David got it.

Overall, this book is powerfully stimulating. I had never considered how unique a time it was when David brought the ark up to Jerusalem before the construction of the Temple under his son. As Christian, history is central for all that we do. Furthermore, God tells his story in symbols of this history. In other words, everything in the Bible is true and symbolic. David's tent for the Ark is no exception, even though it has been largely overlooked.

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The Water and the Wine: A Contribution to the Debate on Children and Holy Communion

2011-09-03T08:46:00.001-07:00

The Water and the Wine: A Contribution to the Debate on Children and Holy Communion by Roger T. Beckwith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

As I come out of the closet as a Presbytanglican, I decided to read an Anglican publication. The (former) Bishop of Rochester, the Right-Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali wrote the foreword to the book. This book is a response to the (previously unknown to me) controversy within the Church of England regarding the proper order of development for children in the church. There are three different phases of life: infancy, childhood and adolescence. There are three different "events" which occur in a non-adult-convert/believers life: baptism, confirmation and communion. Which phases does each occur in, and why? What are the historical precedents for any such positions? These are the questions the book attempts to answer from an Anglican perspective.
The authors spend of great deal of time discussing the history of paedobaptism and the debate over it. Immediately, I was struck by enormous weight given to tradition, extending back to intertestimental Judaism, by the book. Historical and ecclesiastical considerations trump all other methods of argument herein. Whereas I have always approached the debate over paedobaptism from a theological and biblical perspective, such considerations are all but missing in this book.
I would want to point out that baptism is not merely the extension of evangelical Pharisaism, but is a sacrament instituted by Christ specifically as the telos of circumcision. By failing to make the Biblical Theology argument for paedobaptism, the authors fall directly into the trap any Baptist would be proud of: using 1 Corinthians 11 as a sufficient test to preclude the children of believers from coming to the Table. A Baptist would applaud this argument because it take qualifications of one sort and universalizes them without warrant. Adult converts who are plainly coming from the World into the Church must make a clear profession of faith. And yet, children of believers are assumed into the Covenant Community from conception in the Old and New Testaments. Similarly, the rules for maintain Godly fellowship in 1 Corinthians 11 are not a disqualification for children precisely because they are unable to discern the Body of Christ in the same way mature adults are.

This book has been a good reminder to me that I am not Anglican, but Presbytanglican. I value liturgy and ecclesiastical union, but most of all theology. In fact, it is for theological reasons that I esteem smells, bells, robes and architecture as much as I do. I don't anticipate ever being received or even wishing to be in the Church of England, but I am exploring how I might participate in CANA. And overall, I cannot recommend this book on anything but historical research grounds.

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Balancing the Budget Debate

2011-08-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

Because we [Blacks] have such a shallow political leadership, what happens is if you say that, the first thing the Tea Party types and fiscal conservatives do is back up and say, “I’m not a racist.” That’s a knee-jerk reaction. If I preached a sermon at my church and the majority of the women got together after service and said, “That was a sexist sermon,” I can’t simply say, “I love my wife. I love my mother. I’m not a sexist.” I would have to take seriously their critique. What happens is fiscal conservatism refuses to listen to our critique because, in most of their minds, they are not personally racist. So they’re not willing to step back and analyze the racial implications of their philosophy and their policies, and therefore the discussion goes nowhere.
http://www.urbanfaith.com/2011/08/balancing-the-budget-debate.html/

Killing Animals is OK

2011-07-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article by Dennis Johnson about infant baptism when he breaks into a list of changes between the Old Covenant and the New. "Animal sacrifices are done away with because of Jesus' final sacrifice (Hebrews 10)". So, I turned up Hebrews 10, to see if it proved any such thing. In fact, vv 1,2,3,4 and 11 all speak of the sacrifices (being offered at the Temple in Jerusalem) in the present tense. Most Christians are shocked to discover Paul gladly participating the animal sacrifices 30 years after the resurrection of Jesus, in Acts 21.
Yes, Jesus' once and for all sacrifice as the Lamb of God took away our need to slay bulls and goats in order to be reconciled to God. But even in the New Testament, we are called upon to sacrifice (Romans 12). The OT saints were not idiots: they looked beyond "the" land to heaven (Hebrews 11:14-16). It is very reasonable to suppose they looked beyond the sacrifices to the one sacrifice, as John the Baptist did when he instantly knew Jesus to be the "lamb of God".
We will never succeed in persuading the Reformed Baptists that circumcision equals baptism as long as we create even more dichotomy between the Hebrew Epoch and the Greek than there actually is. After the ascension of Jesus, circumcision is adiaphora. Sacrifices are adiaphora. The Temple is adiaphora. Ceremonial law is adiaphora. Abraham was saved by the blood of Jesus, and we still have to tell our neighbors (and ourselves) to "know" God (Jeremiah 31). We do not live in the complete consummation of the Ages. Nor do we live B.C.

Finally: Lutheranism

2011-07-25T04:13:00.000-07:00

Worldview Everlasting - DeYoung, DeRestless & DeRealLiteralLutheran Ninjitsu

I finally found a Lutheran who speaks English and can explain his position in a language I understand. Rev. Fisk is a young, cool, hilarious, talented, ex-Calvinist Lutheran pastor who lays it down on youtube. This is a long video but if you want to quit being an ignoramus (like I was a half hour ago) and begin to grasp the large chiasm that exist between Calvinists and Lutherans then watch it all. And enjoy!

Feeling Blue (No More)

2011-07-21T02:07:00.000-07:00

I have closed "Reformed Avatar", one of my many blogs. The momentum was broken, not just for me, for the community as a whole. A year of going strong after the movie came out is a good run, but the fire can't burn forever without being stoked. The movie fans had died down, but the language fans kept going thanks to Frommer's enthusiasm. Unfortunately, his hands are tied by the corporation and he isn't free to make the language grow without limits. July 10, 2011 is as good a date as any to draw a line in the sand, marking the end of the public growth of the Na'vi language.

I've folded all my "Reformed Avatar" blog posts into this blog, but I thought I should write one last post. There is a sappy song from Shrek 4 that my son has been singing a lot lately, so I thought I'd translate it into Na'vi.

Golden leaves looked brown to me
The world had lost color without you
Shapes in the sky looked plain to my eyes
The world had lost color without you

I know plenty of people
With eyes closed
They don't see you like I do
Darling, I do

Notes on the keys meant nothing to me
The world didn't sing without you
Birds in the trees fell silent for me
The world didn't sing without you

I know plenty of people
With eyes closed
They don't see you like I do
Darling, I do
Darling, I do see you

Oeri ayrìk kllvawm lolam
Luke nga, lu kifkeyru tìkin a 'opin
Ayrenu a tawmì letrrtrr tìng nari

Luke nga, lu kifkeyru tìkin a 'opin

Smon oeru pxaya sute

Fa menari atstu

Nìoe fol ngat ke kame

Oel, ma yawne...

Oeri ayway txanwawe ke lolu

Luke nga, kifkey ke tsun rivol

Oeri ayyayo a ayutralmì fnu

Luke nga, kifkey ke tsun rivol

Smon oeru pxaya sute

Fa menari atstu

Nìoe fol ngat ke kame

Oel, ma yawne

ngati kameie

For me, leaves seemed brown

Without you, the world has a need for color

Patterns in the sky look ordinary

Without you, the world has a need for color

Familiar to me are many people

Using closed (two) eyes

They do not "see" you as I do

Beloved, I ...

For me, songs were not meaningful

Without you, the world cannot sing

For me, birds in trees are quiet

Without you, the world cannot sing

Familiar to me are many people

Using closed (two) eyes

They do not "see" you as I do

Beloved, I

"see" you.

Summer 2011 Newsletter

2011-07-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

July 2011 Newsletter

A Glitch in the Matrix

2011-07-04T02:27:00.000-07:00

Reformed Baptists don't follow through. Getting soteriology right is the most important thing, and they must be commended for that. The doctrines of grace occupy a primary place in theology and those we share them with are our preeminent brothers. But there are necessary implication of those doctrines. New arguments and new scientific data may prompt new discussions, but the same topics of disagreement and the same way of disagreeing continue between Presbyterians and Baptists. as they have from the beginning. All of these disagreements are based on a failure of Reformed Baptists to be consistent in their application of what they believe.

This friendly blog post is prompted by a debate in the comments of my friend Michael Bull's blog post. I've blogged about him before, and I think the world of him. He is a graphic designer, a Reformed Baptist, an FV-proponent, post-millennial, and pro-liturgy: the man can't have a lot of people with whom he agrees on everything! But his three books are innovative, bold and lauded by everyone willing to trying something totally fresh. Basically, I summarize his approach as finding the architectonic structures of Biblical (and hence all) stories within the Biblical itself, especially Genesis 1.

Lately, he has been interacting with Doug Wilson's book, To a Thousand Generations. I read the book 15 years ago, when I first became Reformed, to get a clear rationale for infant baptism. I reread it last year and thought it immensely over-critical of the Mosaic Covenant and quite out of accord with Biblical Theology, as I conceive of it. There is but one Covenant of Grace, and while we are much closer to the end of history than the beginning, there is still vastly more expectation than realization. All that to say, I'm even more Presbyterian than Wilson, with whom Bull is taking issue.

Here is Michael:

If Jews were under the Mosaic Covenant, were Gentiles under anything at all? Yes, they were still under Noah, which ties in with the idea of false gods (Adam), bloodshed (Cain) and harlotry (Sons of God). God’s solution to the entirely corrupted “three-decker” first world was a three-decker miniature, a doorway into a new world, the ark. The Jews had their own ark, the Tabernacle and Temple. So, here it is not circumcision versus baptism. Circumcision divided Jew and Gentile seed. Baptism united them again. The contrast here is actually between Moses and Noah. It is not baptism that is presented as the solution. The Gentiles were called to Gentile purity, the purity of the priesthood of Melchizedek, the godly priesthood of all nations.

God - Transcendence OLD CREATION

…..Jews / Gentiles - Hierarchy (DIVISION)

……….Mosaic purity ~~/ Noahic purity~~ - Ethics (PURIFICATION)

…..Baptism / Baptism - Sanctions (REUNION)

God - Succession NEW CREATION

(bold italics underline emphasis mine, ~~strike-through mine~~)

The general gist his approach is about the nature of story. A covenant begins with an encounter with the Living God. His presence highlights the incomplete status of things. Next, He divides what He sees; what was called good before will not be called good any longer. Then He establishes how things are made right. This is the high point, furthest away from where we began. Then the story starts paralleling itself in reverse. The good and the bad meet and the good wins. Finally, a new situation is born out of the conflict and the whole story-world is different.
In this blog post, Bull is trying to use this newfangled approach to argue against the parallelism of circumcision and baptism. We agree that while the Jews progressed from Genesis 11 until the NT, the Gentile stalled out and were "cut off" from salvation. The line of Abraham was only "cut off" in their foreskin. After the Flood, human nature was just as bad as it was beforehand (Gen 8:21), so Judgment hadn't really fixed anything. The solution comes with God separating a people to Himself. Circumcision was the first of many peculiar signs. The Law of Moses is a sometimes inextricable mix of these temporary, distinguishing laws and eternal, moral laws. Jesus is the fulfillment of both and an end of the "distinguishing" laws. I crossed out "Noahic purity" above because Bull fails to account for this chronological emphasis.
Because of this, Michael is 180 degrees wrong in his conclusion, highlighted above, despite surrounding statements of perfect clarity. Circumcision is what divided Jew from Gentile. Baptism is what they have in common, if they are saved.

All of this is part of the fancy, new way of arguing. In the comments, you can see that all of it comes down to a fundamental disagreement of presuppositions. Baptists think that a commitment to nurture as the means of "saving" anyone -- even our children -- is incompatible with a commitment to evangelism. But these are apples and orangutans: they have nothing to do with each other. Some Presbyterians may be "frozen chosen" but Baptists are losing 70-80% of there children to the World. Bull wants to say the lines of Covenant Succession jump all around -- as opposed to running in familial lines -- but that is only the case if we are unfaithful in raising our children in fear and admonition of the Lord. The fact that we can be eunuchs physically and parents spiritually has nothing to do with the fact that the Bible commands us to be both to our biological offspring.

Recently, I attended a group of former Presbyterians dedicating a child in church. It was pathetic, logically speaking. My good friend, the minister, said the Aaronic blessing over the child, but sprinkled no water. How can a baptist justify dedicating a child? The logical thing to do -- from their position -- would be to pray that the child doesn't die until after they are capable of making a profession of faith!
With God, there are only two types of human beings: those who will be saved, and those who won't. Even in human categories, there are still only three types:

Clearly not being saved
Identifying with the Covenant Community and actually being saved
Identifying with the Covenant Community but in error

A majority of the Bible is written for those in category 3. But there is no category for "clearly not saved but identified with the Covenant Community". Numbers 6:24,25 are for those who are in. No minister of the Gospel would ever say such a blessing over an unbeliever. Why then should we say it over our kids, if they are not already being saved? Baptism is a sign that one are on the Ark -- with Noah -- and not with the Drowned all around it. Jesus "drowned" for such a one, he was cut off from the presence of God in our place. Our children are either baptized or they are hell-bound. There is no in between; it is the Biblical Antithesis. The Reformed Baptist position is a failure to think it through.

Grunge Poetry

2011-06-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

Language is an amazing thing. What was born out of disobedience (Gen 11) will be made glorious for our God (Rev 21). I have always had a knack for languages, which was only strengthened by living all over the world and learning lots of cultures. Language is not like The Matrix: you cannot simply download more information into your head. Words as ideas and sounds have associations of various strengths in one language which may have no parallel in another language. Language carries culture and context.
I've blogged before about the help Ancient Chinese can be to Ancient Hebrew. I blogged most recently about the evocative song "Grab Thy Hand" by Chevelle. Something motivated me to translate that song into Ancient Hebrew:

קְחוּ־לִי

עִתֵּךְ

הִנֵּה תָּאַבְתִּי

שְׁמִטָּה

עָשִׂיתָ עַתָּה

מְגַלֶּה־אָדָם

שֽׁוּב

אֱלֹהִים

הִנֵּה תָּאַבְתִּי

לֶאֱחֹז אֶת־יָדְךָ

וְלִרְאֹות

לָבֹוא

וְלֶאֱחֹז

אַךְ־הַפַּעַם

Why would I do such a weird thing? Because of the associations. As poetry, these little small phrases can call to mind a whole world of Biblical imagery. Reverse translating:

Bring to me

Your time.

Behold I long for

Remittance.

Done ... Now,

Reveals Man

Again.

God,

Behold I long for

To hold your hand

and to see!

To come

and to hold

but once!

Bring Me
1 & 2 Kings is a laid out as a chiasm. At the center are the miracles of Elisha (2 Kings 2:1-8:6). That section is a double chiasm, the first set extending from 2:1 to 4:37. The C and C' of this arch are two miracles about water. In both, God uses means to accomplish his will. In 2:20, Elisha says

קְחוּ־לִי צְלֹחִית

Bring me a bowl

and in 3:15

קְחוּ־לִי מְנַגֵּן

Bring me a minstrel

Both stories highlight God's power to redeem and purify, but also His preference for using means. Later in the book, God promises to heal Hezekiah but they still come to him and put figs on his boils (2 Kings 20:7). We are free to use medicine and agriculture but the reason the crops grow and that food sustains us is God himself.
Your Time
Ezekiel 16:8 and Ecclesiastes 7:17 use this exact phrase, "your time". Both are passages speaking to the man of God. In Ezekiel, God is rehearsing the time of Israel's youth, when she was ready to be wed to Yahweh.
Coming from our perspective, our time is not our own. We don't own our lives and we don't own our bodies. We don't give God the leftovers or what we feel like giving him. All is His and He will demand an account of us for what we did with His things, including time.
Behold I Long
Psalm 119:40 says, "Behold, I long for your precepts, enliven me by your righteousness". Like a starving deer in a parched forest, we are to feel desperate for the LORD. None of us want to live in that state of desperation and longing. We put down roots in this world. But then the Word of God makes no sense to us. Who among us hasn't marveled at how much time is given over in the Psalms to crying out in anguish to God? Unless we are dependent on Him, we aren't living the life He wants for us, and then the help He offers us will seem inappropriate.
Remittance

This word only occurs in Deuteronomy, 15:1,2,9 & 31:10. It is the dropping of debt, the release from monetary bondage. The promise of 15:4 is still valid: someday there will be no poor people in servitude to the rich. Until then, we live in a world were the rich, anti-God Minority world holds the increasingly Christian Majority world by the purse strings. Millions of people cry out for justice, for an end to debt slavery. America and Europe practice money lending like they practice(d) slavery: in perpetuity, contra the Bible. Seven years. The Sabbath Principle needs applying in our day.
Done/Shown ... Now
As Solomon comes to build the Temple in 2 Chronicles 1, he remembers the past in verse 8 and petitions for the present in verse 9

וַיֹּאמֶר שְׁלֹמֹה לֵאלֹהִים אַתָּה עָשִׂיתָ עִם-דָּוִיד אָבִי חֶסֶד גָּדוֹל

And Solomon said to God, "You have shown great kindness to my father David

עַתָּה יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים יֵאָמֵן דְּבָרְךָ עִם דָּוִיד אָבִי

Now, O LORD God, let your promise to David my father be established.

This is how prayer is supposed to go! The steadfast love of the Lord in days gone by moves us to ask Him for more in the present. We are supposed to pray-down the glory of God, to ask Him to do what He wants most to do: to bring praise to Himself! Remember what God has done -- preeminently in His Son Jesus Christ's death, burial and resurrection -- and ask God for more of the same for now!
Reveals Man
Nothing is hidden from the eyes of God. He sees all, and what is worse, everything will be revealed at the end of the ages. Our sins will find us out. Unforgiven sins will be punished as they deserve. If we cling to these sins as our own, we will go down with them. If they are punished on Christ and our lives are hidden in him, then we will live with him forever. Remember, you are but a man.
Return
As I never tire of hearing during Christmastide, we live between two Advents. History is on pause -- there are no new twists or turns in Redemptive History -- as we live out our lives betwixt the two comings of Christ.

Conversely, there is Proverbs 26:11, where a dog returns to his vomit and a fool to his folly. The last word on the previous line was "Adam". As sons of Adam, we all return to his ways, to a rejection of God. Over and over again we return to our sin, even after we are claimed by Christ. What wretched beings we are, and yet He loves us!
To Hold Your Hand
This is a such a cutesy picture in English, but in Hebrew it made me think of Uzza in 1 Chronicles 13:9

וַיִּשְׁלַח עֻזָּא אֶת־יָדֹו לֶאֱחֹז אֶת־הָאָרֹון

And Uzza put forth his hand to hold the Ark

Like Nada and Abihu, Uzza innovated in worship. It is a fearful thing to directly disobey the Lord. David saw the instant justice of God and he freaked out. In light of this, I take Chevelle's cry to be plaintive, as if to say, "O, I wish that I were a ministering angel before the Lord! Or even a Levite that I could touch the Ark of Yahweh, were He dwells!"

You get the idea. Some would consider this nothing but practice for allegorizing Scripture. I think it is better to see it as letting the Bible set the context for all we do. An example of how this works out for good is cremation. It would be hard to find an explicit prohibition of cremation in the Bible. But if you searched for a way to translate the word, you would begin with the fact that it comes from the Latin cremo, to burn. All the references you would find point to a shameful act of unbelief and a rejection of the Resurrection of the Dead to face God. Anything you would wish to translate in favor of cremation would have to parrot texts that denigrate it.

They have built pagan shrines to Baal, and there they burn their sons as sacrifices to Baal. I have never commanded such a horrible deed; it never even crossed my mind to command such a thing! - Jeremiah 9:5

versus

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. - Romans 8:11

A Theology of Anime Fight Scenes

2011-06-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

Driving to work this morning, Chevelle's "Grab Thy Hand" came up in my iPod shuffle and I screamed along. Three times, actually. Five out of five stars. For some reason, as often happens, I translated a thrashing metal song into imagery of a supernatural battle.

It's probably because of watching too many YouTube videos of Final Fantasy battles set to music.

Regardless, there is usually some moral component to my hallucinations. The demon I am battling is evil. I fight for the good King. About the time I realize the music is so epic, it has lulled back into a quieter moment in the song. I imagine myself down on the ground, broken and bloodied with the Enemy over me, gloating. And then it strikes like a blow,
I have sinned.
I have kissed the enemy
who wants nothing but my death.
God gives me his strength to fight
for I have none of myself.
This sword is too heavy for me to lift
and yet I was made for the battle.
I cry as I'm changing lanes. I long to battle but I cannot. I face The One-I-Fear-and-Love. I will not forget that His love for me -- fierce as a blade -- began while I fought and hate him, not when I began to wield His Sword. And I love Him.

As the song played for a third time in a row, my imagery switched to the Day of Atonement and the Holy of Holies.
May I, come in,
how I long,
grab hold,
Just this once.
Grab thy hand and walk.

Through...

This reminds me of Leviticus 16, the one day of the year when the High Priest could enter in and make atonement for the People. Day after day, he would stand in the Temple or the Tabernacle and see the Veil, Where He Dare Not Go. Without holiness no one can see God. But I long to; I want to see my Lord. Beyond the wall is that room I want to go, the presence of God. There is the altar of refuge (Exodus 21:12-14), who horns I can grab with my hands for refuge (1 Kings 1-2). But only once a year. Just this once. By the blood of my Christ, I am able to enter (Hebrews 9:1-10) and not die.

----------------------------------------------
P.S. At my lunch workout, "Grab Thy Hand" came up again while I was on the StairMaster. I went Super Saiyan 2

Preaching Rules

2011-06-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

I think a lot about the theology of preaching lately. I was very heartened, therefore, to read Unashamed Workman's newest post on Principles of Expositions. It's brief but well-written and well worth your time. In short,

Don't let your system of thought rule the text - let the text rule you!
Preach in context of the pericope, text, book and Bible
Remember the text is for you-all, but TO someone else from long ago
Live with the dialectic
Understand the structure of the passage

Number five is most close to my heart. Here's an example from Luke 1:26-38

A. sixth month (26-27)
a.virgin - b.name - b' name - a' virgin
- B. angel εισερχομαι to her (28-30)
  a.favor/Lord with - b.troubled - b' afraid - a' favor/God with
  - C. behold, conceive, in, son (31a)
    - D. called, son, most high (31b-32)
      - E. a.reign - b.forever - a' kingdom b' no end - IMPOSSIBLE! (33)
      - E' a.Mary - b.angel - b' angel - a' Mary - IMPOSSIBLE (34-35a)
    - D' called, son, most high (35b)
  - C' behold, conceive, in, son (36a)

A. six month (36b)
- B. angel απερχομαι to her (37)
Notice how many substructures there are! Not all are chiasm and not are all important, but the literary intent of Luke matters.

The Justification Landscape - ReformedForum.org

2011-06-06T09:48:00.000-07:00

I seem to have attracted a number of Federal Vision proponents to my blog lately. I don't think thats a bad thing at all, but I've really struggled with charitably defining where I differ from the FV/NPP. Fortunately, I listened to The Justification Landscape on Reformed Forum podcast and Mark Garcia did it for me! Please give it a listen and observe the man's charitable and Godly attitude. He is the nicest TR man I've ever heard!

11 Questions Every Pastor Should Ask : Kingdom People

2011-06-06T00:09:00.000-07:00

11 Questions Every Pastor Should Ask : Kingdom People

These questions are so good I felt the need to post them again, for myself!

1. How can I show the congregation how this passage / topic fits into the grand narrative of Scripture?

2. As I preach from the Old Testament, is there anything in my sermon that a faithful Jew could not affirm?

3. As I preach from the New Testament, is there anything in my sermon that a Mormon could not affirm?

4. Am I addressing this topic or cultural issue from a distinctly Christian point of view?

5. What is there in me/us (preacher and congregation) that will rebel against the truth of this text and how can I move us beyond that rebellion?

6. How does the truth I am proclaiming equip Christ’s church to be on mission for the kingdom of God?

7. If our church were to cease to exist, would anyone in the community be affected? Would anyone mourn the loss?

8. What would the result be if everyone in our church shared the gospel as often as I do?

9. What are the unique needs of our community that our church members could address as part of providing a platform for proclaiming the gospel?

10. Are the programs and activities of our church the best way to spend our time, money, and energy to spread the gospel locally and globally?

11. Am I focused primarily on training people to bring the lost to church where I will present the gospel? Or am I focused on equipping people to share the gospel throughout the week in their workplace, neighborhood, and schools?

Dooyeweerd

2011-05-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

In Classical Greek civilization the leading power was the πόλις, the Greek city-state. It was the carrier of the new culture religion of the Olympian gods. In classical Roman times, it was the res republica, the Roman commonwealth, and later the emperor as the figure who personified the religious idea of imperium. The idea of the sacrum imperium (the holy empire) remained in the Byzantine period, have accommodated itself externally to Christianity. The tradition of the "Holy Roman Empire" continued in the Christian rule of Charlemagne and his successors. By that time the Germanic peoples had accepted the heritage of ancient civilization and had adopted the Christian religion. It should be noted that the adaptation of Christianity to the Roman idea of imperium at the end of the third century signified a crisis in the foundations of ancient culture.

Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture, 10

That last sentence is key. So far, Herman has not tipped his hat whether his is for or against Constantine. If he goes against, he will be the first thoughtful writer I would consider worthy of being pitted against Leithart's devastating argument in favor of Christendom. I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with a lot of Post-Mills on much of their evaluation of history, while remaining Amill.

Baptism is a Threat

2011-04-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

Normally, I'm a mouth-breathing fan-boy of Peter Leithart's. About half of his blog posts get copied straight into my personal wiki. And the rate at which he cranks out profound insights is startling.
And so I was amazed -- as usual -- at his insight into Isaiah 8:5-8:

⁵The LORD spoke to me again: ⁶"Because this people has refused the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, and rejoice over Rezin and the son of Remaliah, ⁷therefore, behold, the Lord is bringing up against them the waters of the River, mighty and many, the king of Assyria and all his glory. And it will rise over all its channels and go over all its banks, ⁸and it will sweep on into Judah, it will overflow and pass on, reaching even to the neck, and its outspread wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel."

Isaiah 8 gives Israel a choice of water. If they don’t want the gentle waters of Shiloah, He’ll provide other water.
Shiloah is the water source for Jerusalem. It was a stream running from outside the city into the city, and it was the source that kept Jerusalem fruitful and alive. Isaiah uses that water source as an image of Yahweh’s provision, of Yahweh Himself. He is the gently flowing waters of Judah, the source that turns Jerusalem into a garden city. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God – that river is Yahweh Himself. But Judah has rejected that stream, and at least some in Judah are ready to put in their lot with Rezin and Pekah. They don’t rejoice in Yahweh and His water, but rejoice instead in the political alliance that will project them against the Assyrians. What will keep Judah alive is not the spring that is Yahweh, but an alliance that will protect Jerusalem’s water source.
Ahaz himself, as we see in 2 Kings, is relying on Assyria. He makes an alliance with Assyria rather than rely on Yahweh. He is afraid that if he doesn’t ally with Assyria, the Assyrian king will come down and cut off the stream of Shiloah, interrupted Judah’s water supply. If he doesn’t rely on the waters of the Euphrates, he may end up with no water at all. “You want Assyrian water, you get Assyrian water,” Yahweh says. More than ever you wanted, more than you can use, water from the Euphrates so abundant that it will overflow everything and wash away everything in its path. The wings of the Assyrians will spread out over Judah and Jerusalem, covering the whole breadth of Abraham’s land.

But then, using the same text as a baptismal meditation, he totally dropped the ball:

Baptism is not a threat. If Atticus [the baptized child] rejects the gentle waters of Shiloah, he will be drowned in the curses of the covenant. That’s true. Still, baptism is not a threat; and baptism is not neutral. Baptism is the gift of Shiloah. The water that pours over him today is the water of the Spirit, the water that will make Atticus, who is made of dust, flourish like the rose in the desert.

Frankly, I don't get it. How can you say, "if you reject the covenant, you will be drowned" and not call it a threat? I understand not wanting to make the sign of Covenant Initiation a negative thing, but then don't mention the word at all.
Perhaps it's where I'm at, mentally. I just preached a sermon on the whole book of Ezekiel. Fully half of the book -- chapters 1 to 24 -- are oracles of judgment against a people who have broken the Covenant. As Dr. Rayburn says repeatedly in his sermon series on Ezekiel, all these seemingly harsh judgments are nothing more than the fulfillment of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 27, the provisions of the Covenant that deal with failure. 1 Peter 3:18-22 clearly connects failure for the baptized to drowning in Noah's Deluge. Perhaps I'm getting my first taste of why some people part ways so heavily with the FV over sacraments. :-(

2011-04-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

From thegospelcoalition.org

Very helpful as I prepare to preach on Ezekiel

1. What does this story proclaim about God and his relationship with his people?
As this first question suggests, the goal is to identify the theology communicated by the narrative. As a “former prophet,” Judges intends to communicate a specific message from God to his people. I find one of Haddon Robinson’s categories helpful at this point. He counsels preachers to look for “the vision of God” in a text—the aspect of attribute of God’s character that is highlighted.
2. How does this theological message connect with the Bible’s larger story or meta-narrative?
This second question links the theology of a story with the gospel because the Bible’s larger story is the gospel! The Gospel Coalition frames the story of the Bible like this: God providentially brings about his eternal good purposes to redeem a people for himself and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his glorious grace. Along this line, Bryan Chapell’s perspective is worth pondering:

Even if a preacher does not specifically mention an aspect of Christ’s earthly ministry in a sermon, it can still be Christ-centered. As long as a preacher explains the ways in which God uses a text to reveal his plan, purposes, and/or reasons for redemption, the sermon leads listeners away from human-centered religiosity. Exposition is Christ-centered when it discloses God’s essential nature as our Provider, Deliverer, and Sustainer whether or not Jesus is mentioned by name.

3. What admonition or exhortation does this story offer?
The first question identifies the theological message of the story. The second question connects the story and its theological message with the overall storyline of the Bible. This third question determines the ethical thrust of the story. For those who use Andy Stanley’s grid, my first two questions correspond to his question, “What do I want my listeners to know?” My third question corresponds to his question, “What do I want my listeners to do?”
This third question reflects my disagreement with a strict Christ-centered approach when it says: “We do not confront men with Christ by preaching theological ideas nor by ethical exhortations, but by rehearsing the saving events witnessed in Scripture.” But this approach is, I believe, unnecessarily reductionistic. When the apostles spoke of the gospel and rehearsed its saving events, they issued a call for nonbelievers to believe (see Acts 2:38-41 and 1 Cor 15:1-2) and a call for believers to align their behavior with the gospel (see Gal 2:14). Sermons from Judges should not do less, especially since Judges is a “former prophet” who calls God’s people to a response! To put it another way, gospel-centered preaching does not preclude imperative. Rather, it always grounds the imperative (what you must do) in the indicative (what God has done for you in Christ). A message is sub-gospel and sub-Christian when it calls listeners to be or to do something without presenting it as a response to God’s grace in the power that God’s grace provides through the finished work of Jesus Christ. For nonbelievers, the call for a response centers on entrance into God’s kingdom through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. For believers, the call for response centers on a lifestyle worthy of the gospel of Christ (see Phil 1:27).
Admittedly, finding the exhortation in a story is often more challenging than finding it in the New Testament epistles since stories communicate their messages more subtly. But another one of Haddon Robinson’s categories proves useful here. In addition to identifying a text’s “vision of God,” Robinson counsels preachers to identify its “human condition” or “depravity factor.” The latter category refers to the sin that keeps God’s people from responding to the aspect of his character that is at issue in the text.

Avatar Bodies

2011-04-02T17:07:00.000-07:00

HT: LN: Why I Love Avatar

‘If I could just leave my body for a night’] expresses in the simplest terms possible what may well be the deepest, strongest, most tragically impossible desire a human being can have, and Avatar dares to let us see that desire gratified. That, above all else, is perhaps the secret of the movie's appeal: it shows us a world in which technology has made it possible, at least to an extent, for human beings to leave their bodies and enter into an existence that, unlike ours, is truly worthy of its bearers. Beneath all our idealistic fantasies of a perfect world, it is ultimately the inescapable limitations of our own bodies, our hated corporeal frailty—signified just as much by Dr. Grace's smoking habit as by Jake's disability—that is the source of our pain, and from that pain we will never be free. Avatar, though, lets us almost believe, if only for a few hours, that someday we might be.”- Nicholas Cox, Nassau Weekly

I would only amend this by saying it is not bodies in general that are body (obviously sense he wants to enter another, material body!) but only fallen bodies. In the Resurrection, bodies won't be like this. Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life, Eternal Life.

stormies

2011-03-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

stormy a to go
place in your
I,
would be you
by lightning killed
where,
hail ripped
soft apart
your skin.
Your hands
an umbrella
aren't.
insulated You
have heart.
hail-maker was the
made But flesh,
Zeus baby
a in a storm;
Lifeacrossbecameitself.

Fiery Serpents 3 - Jesus

2011-03-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

Over the last two posts, I have tried to establish that the wilderness journey was a retracing of the Garden of Eden journey. The place was geographically identical. Food was the problem in both cases. And in the episode of the "fiery serpents", the bronze snake serves in the same capacity as the cherubim with the flaming sword in Genesis 3. Today I will conclude by examining the connection with the New Testament.

Sometimes, the key to understand an Old Testament passage is the entire system of doctrine made clear in the New Testament. Other times, it is that plus a very blatant explanation of the plain facts somewhere else in the Bible. For example, the acceptability of Abel's offering and the rejection of Cain's is rather opaque, until you read Hebrews 11. I think Numbers 21:4-9 is a similar conundrum, which John 3:14 explicates.

¹⁴And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

R.C. Sproul does a fine job with the John text in his sermon here. Peter Leithart points out a chiasm (in the Greek word order) centered on "in the wilderness". The parallel nature of the serpent and the Son of Man seems to imply a parallel agency of Moses. This insinuates that Jesus is crucified because the Law required that he be. We would all agree that the system of sacrifices in Leviticus pointed to the ultimate provision for sin in the sacrifice of Christ.

We are to read the Bible backwards, reading the ending back into the beginning. What are we to do with the Cross? We are to boast in it, to rejoice in it, to find ourselves there, just as Ancient Israel was supposed to.

^{Galatians 6:14}But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Crucifixes have been made passe and crosses are common jewelery, but think about the original weight of what Paul is saying! We are to completely identify with the most ignoble, horrible form of torture and death. Who was crucified in the Roman Empire? Only those who had committed treason, heinous crimes which ought to be hated.
Now come back to the snakes. The children of Israel were guilty of the worst kind of treason, rejecting the inheritance of the Lord, the food that he provided. They are chastised and repent, and Moses intervenes. They ask for the removal of the snakes, but instead they have to look at one. Just as God did not simply expiate our sins, but propitiated them in Christ, so the snakes are not taken away, but put at the center. If we cannot identify with the humiliated servant of God, then we have not really looked to the Father, merely away from our sins.
The bronze serpent on a pole is a prefigurement of our judgment. The way back into the Garden is not some innovative assault on the walls, but a walking right up to the flaming guardian and an acceptance of his sword in our chest. When we are caught by God in sin, we don't run and hide or make clothes of fig leaves. Instead, we wear the bloody apparel of his body broken for us. For all eternity, our drink will be the shed blood of the Son of God. The Gospel is that we are saved from God, by God, for God. There is not an angry God of the Old Testament and redemptive, sweet God of the New. He is one and the same. The same snakes were sent by God as judgment. As his angels, we look to their hands for our deliverance also. The same Christ who died for our sins is the one who will come again in judgment over all the earth.

A friend of mine wondered allowed yesterday is the body which Christ manifested to the disciples after the resurrection was his "eternal" glorified body, or just a "simply-risen" one. The thought was, we will not be in Glory with flawed bodies, so why would Jesus persist into infinite with scars and holes, like the one Thomas put his hand in? But that is his "forever" form, his badges of eternal glory. The Sin of Mankind will echo through the endless ages, forever part of the Unchangeable God. We will never move on from the one God who hates sin and yet died for it. The crucified messiah is Punishment and Reconciliation in one. The snake that bite us is the one who saves us too.

A.
a. And the people became impatient on the way. - 5And the people spoke against God and against Moses,
    b. "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?
        c. For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food."
        c' 6 Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people,
    b' so that many people of Israel died.
a' 7 And the people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned, - for we have spoken against the LORD and against you.
B.
d. Pray to the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us."
d' So Moses prayed for the people.
A'
e. 8And the LORD said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole,
    f. and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live."
e' 9So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole.
    f' And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.

Fiery Serpents 2 - Words

2011-03-08T02:16:00.000-08:00

Last time, I had some length quotes from David Chilton's Paradise Restored (PDF) which illustrated the symbolic nature of the exodus. Israel was lead back to the beginning of history, near the place where the Garden of Eden had been, in order to start history over. Collectively, they were a new Adam. God was elevating the people he had set apart for his name's sake and getting ready to glorify them as his new priests, new ambassadors of the Nations. Manna was like the bdellium outside the Garden, a symbol of God's generosity.
Israel was in the desert, seeing what happens to the land that deserts Yahweh, and yet they rebel yet again.
Today I want to look at the Hebrew words that are used in Numbers 21. Again, this kind of analysis is common for Peter Leithart or James Jordan, but not for my (imaginary) mentor.

From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way.

Impatient/קצר/Qatsar can mean "shorten" - as in "short tempered" - or it can mean "reap". The children of Israel prematurely expect to harvest the fruit of the kingdom. In Leviticus 23:10, God uses the same verb but says "when you come into the land". We must humbly wait for God's blessing.

And the people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food."

Food is literally "bread". In the same sentence, they say there is no bread, and yet the bread they clearly have before them is worthless/insignificant.

Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.

Now comes the key term. My hero (following Wenham) is content to dismiss the crucial words "fiery serpent", saying The NIV’s “venomous snakes” is literally “fiery snakes” as in the ESV. The “fiery” probably derives from the color of the serpent or the pain of the bite or the inflammation of the skin caused by it. [Wenham, 157]. I couldn't disagree more. The word "fiery" is שרף/saraph or seraph. The plural - seraphim - is one of the few Hebrew words to come into English directly. These flaming angels terrified Isaiah in his vision of God's thone (Isaiah 6).
But another connection is evident when you consider the other half of the phrase - serpent/נחש/nachash. The star of Genesis 3 is making a massive, second appearance. And how does Genesis 3 end?

He [God] drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

Now, were are back in the place which Adam was kicked out of, and the new Adam is meeting Seraphim, who are kissing-cousins to the Cherubim. "Sword" - חרב/cherub - sounds like כרוב/kerubim/cherubim) and "bronze" - נחשת/nechoth - sounds like נחש/nachash/snake).

This is a very different and difficult kind of connection, but perhaps an English parallel would help. If Genesis 3 had concluded with a "gargantuan guardian" and Numbers 21 featured the construction of a "centennial sentinel", we would grok it right away. Instead we have to see that the cherubim's sword and the bronze serpent are the keepers of God's kingdom. Tomorrow, we will conclude on how we should treat them.

Fiery Serpents - 1. Symbolism

2011-03-07T04:48:00.000-08:00

I know there are no genies in bottles, but if there were, I've got my list ready. And one of my three -- which would take a genie -- is to be mentored by a certain pastor. He is so learned and well-read that he can find profound and scholarly insight into any passage of Scripture.
Any passage, that is, except Number 21:6-9. Two years ago, he rightly pointed out the glaring inconsistencies in Iain M. Duguid's and R. Kent Hughes' commentary on the passage. He also was baffled at Gordon Wenham's unhelpful explanation of the pericope. And at the point in the sermon where he normally turns to offer a brilliant explanation, my idol had to say he had no idea what to do with the passage. Instead he gave a stupendous exposition on what to do when you don't understand a passage, on how simple the gospel is.

Now I am a fool to aver knowledge where my imaginary-mentor has laid claim to none, but I can't help myself! I'm not ready to preach on this passage (yet), but I think the building blocks of understanding can be found. Since I've already mentioned Post-Millenialism, let me introduce my first line of thought. In his rabidly Post-Mill book Paradise Restored, David Chilton has some amazing insights into the exodus. The first thing to see is that it is a return to Eden. Geographically, Israel was being lead past the place where it all begin. As the New Adam, they were taken back to the beginning and given a chance to start the whole thing over. Page 30:

A major key to the location of the original Garden of Eden is the fact that the four great rivers which watered the earth derived from the one river in Eden (Genesis 2:10-14). The Flood drastically altered the geography of the world, and two of these rivers (the Pishon and the Gihon) no longer exist. The other two rivers are the Tigris (Hiddekel in Hebrew) and the Euphrates, which do not now originate from the same source, as they did then. But the Bible does tell us where these rivers were located: the Pishon flowed through the land of Havilah (Arabia); the Gihon flowed through Cush (Ethiopia); the Tigris flowed through Assyria; and the Euphrates flowed through Syria and Babylon (from whence it now meets up with the Tigris, about 40 miles above the Persian Gulf). The common source for these rivers was, of course, north of Palestine, and probably due north, in the area of Armenia and the Black Sea — which is, interestingly, the place where the human race began again after the Flood (Genesis 8:4). Eden, as the source of water, was thus the source of blessing for the world, providing the basis for life, health and prosperity to all God’s creatures.

Chilton goes on to point out that the stones on priestly garb were memorials (page 33) but

A memorial of what? The only mention of the onyx prior to the Exodus is in Genesis 2:12, with reference to the Garden of Eden! God wanted His people to look at the High Priest – who was in many ways a symbol of man fully restored in God’s image — and thus to remember the blessings of the Garden, when man was in communion with God. The stones were to serve as reminders to the people that in saving them God was restoring them to Eden.
An even more striking example of this is in what we are told about God’s provision of manna. In itself, manna was a reminder of Eden: for even while God’s people were in the wilderness (on their way to the Promised Land of abundance), food was plentiful, good-tasting, and easy to find — as, of course, it had been in the Garden. But, just in case they might miss the point, Moses recorded that manna was the color of bdellium (Numbers 11:7) –the only occurrence of that word apart from its original mention in the book of Genesis! And this, by the way, tells us the color of bdellium, since we are told elsewhere (Exodus 16:31) that manna was white. In our Lord’s messages to the Church in the Book of Revelation, Edenic imagery is used again and again to describe the nature of salvation (see Revelation 2-3), and on one occasion He promises: “To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone” (Revelation 2:17).
It is noteworthy that these statements regarding onyx and bdellium were made as Israel was traveling through the land of Havilah! As they journeyed, they could observe the terrible effects of the Curse, which had turned this beautiful and wellwatered land into a “waste and howling wilderness” — while they, through grace, were able to enjoy the blessings of the Garden of Eden. This theme of Eden-restoration was also evident in the abundant use of gold for the Tabernacle and Temple furnishings (Exodus 25; 1 Kings 6), and for the garments of the High Priest (Exodus 28). The forfeited privileges of the First Adam are restored to us by the Last Adam, as we once again come into God’s presence through our High Priest.

I think this long quotation is important for two reasons. 1) We are not used to thinking about these items as symbols of such things, and 2) We have already-engrained meanings for everything we encounter in Scripture which must be overcome. Now, let's take a look again at Numbers 21:6-9 with these concepts in mind as we read the words "serpent", "fiery" and "bronze".

Avatar Matrix

2011-02-28T05:46:00.000-08:00

There is a fantastic man named Michael Bull, who maintains a great blog and has written three beautiful books. All too briefly, his thesis is that the vast majority of the Bible and Life follow the seven-fold pattern of the seven days of creation, the seven annual feasts of the Old Testament and this pattern here:

Creation
Division
Ascension
Testing
Maturity
Conquest
Glorification

I think one of the reasons Avatar succeeds so well for me, is that it follows the Biblical pattern of a good story.

Creation

As I've already written about seven times in succession, the opening 20 minutes is about Jake's pseudo-birth as a human, followed by his real birth as a Na'vi/avatar. The death of his brother is his chance to "step into shoes" and be born anew. Complete with blue wombs, blue amniotic fluid and birth into the light, this introduction is all about creation and identity.

Division

No sooner is Jake out and about in his new body, than he must face is future-nemesis in the face, and appears to accept this devil's offer of selfish salvation. Jesus, of course, did not succumb to Satan in the wilderness. Jake also divides from the scientists, to whom he is nothing but "an idiot with a gun." This violent rip from the old world is like God making the firmament in the midst of heaven, to separate the water below from the water above (don't ask me to draw you a picture!). Running away from Grace, escaping the thanator by going over a waterfall, being cut off from rescue and being anathema to his rescuer are all part of his being "set apart". Of course the biggest "special anointing" is the flock of glowing woodsprites that land on him!

Ascension

First Jake merely has to climb the ranks of the Na'vi to prove himself a warrior. But the literal ascent to the top of the Floating Mountains makes my point for me. With the help of the guide (Neytiri) who brought him into this new world, he conquers the challenge set before him.

Testing

More can gleaned about this "phase" of the movie by watching the special features. There is a deleted scene right after Jake gets the face-paint put on. In it, he eats a poisonous worm in order to undergo the Dream Hunt. In agony, he discovers that his "spirit animal" is the Great Leonopteryx. The destruction of Hometree is the key to the Testing section, however. By the end of it, Jake is wrong, rejected, in jail, hated and in need.

Maturity

Maturity is facing facts with wisdom. Wisdom is seeing a future state of affairs and realizing that future with confidence. Jake is wise to the fact that he must become Toruk Makto, and he makes it happen. He returns to the People in such a position of power that he is able to make requests for huge things, and they comply. He admits everything to Eywa, the deity he didn't even know existed before and

Conquest

As the new leader, Jake attacks everything we all know to be wrong. Admittedly, Quarich is coming towards him, but he throws every resource at that devil. Though he once sided with him, he is now his polar opposite. Good wins and even death (which is what thanator means in Greek) is subdued and ridden.

Glorification

In a deleted scene, Tsu'tey hands over the reins of power willingly. The "dying people" are forced to leave Pandora. Jake gets the body that matches his true nature. The end matches the beginning.

As already noted, this pattern is the mono-myth of Western culture. Our heroes need to fall into a certain pattern to be compelling to us. The Bible Matrix is a great tool because it expands on the mono-myth and makes it completely universal, telling us what good stories are based off of God's pattern.

Christian Letter to Eywa

2011-02-21T04:48:00.000-08:00

Dear Eywa,

I remain hopeful that you will write me back, even while I am assailed by doubts. I don't expect a piece of paper in my mailbox or a communiqué from pandora.com, so I think your correspondence will take the form of answers from devotees here on Earth. Amidst the clamor and chaos of their own voices, I think I will be able to discern your self-disclosure, so I welcome them all.

First, let me admit that I am very curious about you! A sentient being unlike Humans or the Na'vi is an intellectual puzzle for me. What is your experience of self? Do you feel loneliness that there is no one else of your kind, or is the myriad memories of the Na'vi you’ve accumulated as well as the constant input from an entire planet enough to satisfy such urges? What is your earliest memory? I gather that your regulate the balance of life on Pandora, but what processes require your conscience attention and which are automatic, like humans not beating their own hearts versus raising their hand? Grace Augustine said that the connections between trees is like the connections between neurons for us, but are the other plants (and the animals) part of your “body” in ways analogous to the other organ systems of human beings? I would love to sit down and hear you describe your thoughts and actions beginning when Jake Sully spoke to you about the impending human attack, to the dispatching of so many animals to intervene in the conflict.

But whether or not I get all those curiosities satisfied, we still have a lot of things about which we may talk. As you know, nothing occurs in a vacuum; everything happens in a context, in an ecosystem. Your existence strikes human beings in a certain way because of our history. Some people have even wanted to translate your name (instead of simply transliterating it) as Gaia, an ancient Greek goddess who was the anthropomorphized earth. Therefore, I will prioritize my questions to you in a certain way. I could phrase things delicately, but I don't think you will be offended by directness: Why do you permit the Na'vi to worship you?

A majority of human beings are monotheists, that is, they believe in one God who created the universe and the Laws of Nature. In simplest form, He is the reason there is something, and not nothing! Of course, you are due much respect, honor, deference and authority. You preside over a planet in a way we can scarcely comprehend. But you are not Ultimate, as you yourself must know. What you and I have in common -- same as Prometheus and porcupines -- is that we owe our initial and continued existence to Another. You may have shepherded the life and death of all organisms on Pandora, but you are not the inventor of nitrogen, nor the reason the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years. As such, worship is not due you.

I will, nevertheless, caveat my objection. Here on Earth, we lack tsaheylu -- the bond -- which the Na'vi have to other animals on Pandora. Our interconnectedness is abstract and ephemeral. It is a recent development to think of “symbiont circles” or “ecological systems”. But it is still proper to delineate individual organisms and species within an ecology. Hence, the Tree Song is metaphorical, an overstatement to correct a failure of interdependency:

We are all seeds
Of the Great Tree,
Whose strength is in our legs
Like the mighty trunks,
In our arms
As sheltering branches,
In our eyes
The blue-flower
Which unfolds to the sun.
We are all seeds
Of the Great Tree
Whose song is within us.

Utralä aNawm
ayrina' lu ayoeng,
A peyä tìtxur mì hinam awngeyä
Na aysangek afkeu,
Mì pun
Na ayvul ahusawnu,
Mì aynar
Na seze
A 'ong ne tsawke.
Utralä aNawm
ayrina’ lu ayoeng,
A peyä tìrol mì awnga.

“Plants and animals” are categories developed on Earth; they may not apply well on Pandora. Neologisms like “planimals” and “aniplants” are more appropriate much of the time. But the Na'vi and Humans transcend these categories. We are not seeds of the Great Tree in and of ourselves. The non-sentient world feeds and sustains us without subsuming our inherent nature. We cannot live without food, but in eating it we do not become food. ‘Purpose’ makes us different from everything else in the universe, and in that we are akin to God.

Thank you again for your self-disclosure up to this point, and I look forward to our continued exchanges.

God be with you,

Eltu Lefngap Makto

Dances with Aynantang

2011-02-15T04:20:00.000-08:00

I've managed to find myself another obsession lately. Obviously, I was already interested in Avatar, since I started this blog, but the monomania is now totally out of control. I had seen snippets of Na'vi, the language Paul Frommer invented for the movie, but it wasn't until I discovered learnnavi.org that I was able to learn it. I am now at the point where I could be writing most of this blogpost in it, though it would take me about ten times as long.

My wife asked me a very good question the other day, one that I hear in less diplomatic forms from most of my Christian friends and family: "Why Avatar?" The most common argument against the movie is that it is derivative, a rehashing of previous stories. My response is to wonder what story is totally original? The summary I heard going into the theater for the first time was "Dances with Wolves meets Ferngully in Space". That did nothing to deter me, since Dances with Wolves is one of my all time favorite movies. In high school, I think I watched that movie once a week for a year. Ferngully was an OK kid's cartoon, but Robin Williams did his stock shtick, and it was very old by that time.
People who know me (like my wife) can understand why I liked Dances with Wolves so much. The theme of being culturally adrift and finding oneself in the strangest of places makes sense for a boy who moved every six months growing up and never fit in anywhere. But why now, would I still like a similar movie when I am grounded and established in my faith, a happy family man, with a new career about to begin? The answer lies in the rich, unattainability of the dream. John Dunbar doesn't encounter the Indians of North America. Instead, he meets the idyllic people of perfection. He doesn't just change allegiances, but is made into a new person, with a new nature.

When I try to draw the line through my life, from Dances with Wolves to Avatar, I find inextricably draw to see another major point of intersection: The Matrix. What was I looking for during the eight times I saw that first movie in the theater? I found myself agreeing body and soul with Morpheus
"You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain -- but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life; that there's something wrong with the world; you don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"The Matrix," Neo asks.
You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes; it is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."
And Neo asks, "What truth?"
"That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else, you were born into bondage; born into a prison...
What Avatar and Dances with Wolves express positively, The Matrix expressed negatively: there is something wrong with the world. It is OK to wish for something unattainable, something impossible, during your whole life. You and I weren't meant to live like this, with death and evil all around and inside us. We long for a new nature. We don't just want to go somewhere different for a fleeting moment. We want to be different. Of all people, Christians should be the first to embrace these movies, not because they offer the perfect solution, but because they diagnose the problem correctly. Being made new creations by the atoning work of Christ on the Cross is the only prescription, but no one who shuns the diagnosis takes the right medicine.

The Father's love, the Saviour's grace, the Spirit's power

2011-01-19T11:04:00.000-08:00

We sing the Father's love–
We trust the Savior's grace;
The Holy Spirit’s power we prove,
Amidst the chosen race.
We give the Father praise–
We glorify the Son–
We bless the Spirit for his grace,
Which makes salvation known.
'Twas God the Father chose
Our souls in God the Son;
And God the Holy Ghost bestows
All blessings from the throne.
A Triune God we own,
In daily songs of praise;
In persons three, in essence one,
The God of sov'reign grace.

— Joseph IronsZion's HymnsHymn 411

(HT: OFI, Fred Sanders)

To a Fallen Sparrow

2011-01-19T10:53:00.000-08:00

Why do the fairest fall? O heart, O heart!
   How often must you sigh at senseless pain?
What blows break others, and you feel the smart?
   Why bleed you from another's opened vein?
   If you could pour in torrents forth a rain
Of your own life in some sad spot apart,
                And leave this tear-dimmed vale,
Where only the guiltless suffer, and where rage
   The heathen throng and prosper, it were well.
But to be senseless for many a cruel age
   Were better than to thrive where sweetlings fail.

Why did you fall? The kite spreads yet his wing
   And spies out all things putrefied; the crow
Still belches forth his dissonance; – but sing!
   But fly! poor golden-throated bird, struck low
   As yet still in your summer-prime, – but sow
The notes of glad forgetfulness, till ring
                This broken world with joy.
Your guileless chirp once brightened pain-dulled eyes,
   Your flutter-step brought cheer without alloy,
Your feather-form was laughter in blue skies,
   And danced like the locks that crowned the maid of Troy.
No more! Your form is eloquent and still,
   And testifies, “no more”. The life is gone
That heretofore beat out a pulsing will,
   Hush'd now forever. Now the soul is flown,
   But still the corpse lies motionless and lone,
A testament that all the fair must fail,
                While all the foul survive.
The reddest rose is e'er the first to droop,
   The bramble-bush alone is left alive;
The tender tiger lilies start to stoop,
   But still the loathsome milkweed dares to thrive.
And so it is with you, O heart of mine!
   What moments of pure laughter I had known
Are burst like bubbles; spilt is pleasure's wine,
   And at the bottom of the cup's a groan
   That will not fade away. Still rots the bone
Though all the marrow's gone. The moldering vine
                E'er lingers like a ghost,
Brown, sere, and gaunt, whose grapes were very joy,
   But now have vanished like Assyria's host
The Lord struck dead. The charming maid, too coy
   To wed, now withers like an empty boast.
Somewhere, a little, living, longed-for pearl
   Has formed in one for seven years or more
Thought barren; ah! what chafings shaped the girl,
   Her mother's choicest jewel, wrought of ore
   She only knows who's wept tears of such store
As flowed from her own eyes – but not one curl
                Will grace that darling head:
No sooner has bright hope burst from the womb
   Than darksome vanity has struck it dead;
The swaddling-clothes are shrouds now for a tomb,
    Joy so long in the kiln so swift has fled.
Why should the child die? On the self-same bed,
   An old, grey, lingering whisper of a shade,
For seven years and more as good as dead,
   Will drag out achingly a life that's played
   Already too, too long, till he who prayed
She might be spared could wish his pleas unsaid!
                Methuselah-like is pain,
While pleasure is a mayfly, here today
   To flit and laugh in summer's sun, till rain
Take all her sunny laughing-fields away
   And trade oblivion's gloom for summer's ray.
Why do the wicked prosper? asked the king;
   Would I could hear him now the answer tell!
He who knew full well what sad life can bring,
   And watched while all he loved around him fell;
   How did he break the endless sorrow-spell
That cast its web around him, crippling?
                With what sharp sword in hand
Did he cut off the giant-head Despair,
   Bring round a golden age in all the land
And find in woe the seed of all that's fair?
   How knew he all pain is for pleasure planned?
No, no, I must not linger, little bird!
   I drink too deeply from the Fount of Woe,
My ear's now all a-jumble, while a Word
   I can't make out is urging me to go.
   Ah, little, tender birdling, could you know
The Promise erst of that sweet psalmist heard,
                You'd sweetly sleep in peace:
There's not an innocent who dies in vain,
   There's not a stroke but makes joy to increase,
And every death of every smallest grain
   Proves Sunday's hope of everlasting ease.

HT: Reformation Theology

2010-12-25T21:43:00.000-08:00

It's easy to see why Jake has such a hard time coming out of the link: he not only fell asleep in the Na'vi world, he entered a cocoon there, as if he were going to go into a world within that one, not returning to the human world. It is so difficult to wake him, that (presumedly some time later) the first thing he sees is Grace shining a flashlight in his eyes. This got me thinking, since it's the same thing the scientists did to him as he first entered his avatar body. Here's some possible structures (' = minutes, " = second, all in the standard edition)

A. Selfridge - this rock is why we're here (12'-14')
B. Norm good, Jake bad to Dr. A. (15')
C. Light in eye (16')

Fun the New Body (in two parts) (16'30"-19')
Quaritch's Domination (19'45"-23')

Pandora's Beauty (in two parts) (24'-33'35")
The Tribe doesn't Kill Him (34'-48')

C' Light in eye (48'30")
B' Jake hero, Norm dejected by Dr. A. (49'05")
A' Selfridge, look at all that cheddar (49'20"-51')

The means, by the end where Jake says, "We're wasting time" that we've come full circle back to near the beginning. Dr. Augustine was he mentor and Norm was his rival/brother as Jake entered the lab, but now we begin again. Neytiri is the new mentor and Tsute is the rival/brother.

I thought this section of the movie was unimportant when I began today, but now I see it is about reversals. Grace says she cannot comprehend why the People have chosen Jake, while Quaritch is confident that they will leave the tree. Ultimately, Grace humility proves wise and Selfridges' self-righteousness proves disastrous. Parker's total disconnect from reality is pictured by his drooling over digital maps and the fake sky over his head; our common punctuation in this film is transmuted into a cheesy electronic outline over his head.

First Sight

2010-12-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

What is the problem with the dark? Jake cannot SEE. (Remember the loaded word.) The dogs are a problem, but as Neytiri says, Jake has no fear. The bioluminescence is everywhere, but most importantly, it is IN Jake. Therefore, he doesn't even SEE himself. Notice too how the dogs are up in the tree, looming over Jake Sully. As his first walk with Neytiri shows, he thinks in awfully two-dimensional terms for a man who dreams of flying! She says prayers over the dead dogs, while Jake speaks blasphemously. Last in this list of flaws, the dogs have a group identity, while Jake is alone. All this will be slowly rectified.

After the rebukes are over, the playful music starts. But it is only to make the seriousness that follows stand out. "You should not be here." Is she right? Is he "sky-people"? If so, it is death for him to proceed. Having shed the initial layers of his old-self, he is fit to enter in. However, his kenosis (a Greek term meaning emptying) is not enough. All the burnt-out, hollow people in the world could've been given his opportunity and would've made it no further. What makes the difference is the holy dandelion puffs.

In Christian circles, there are Arminians who say God and Man cooperate for salvation. That is the picture here, in Avatar. I, a Calvinist, would say true salvation is all of God. You do your part, only because God has already worked within you.
Neytiri's comment -- "very pure spirits" -- is endemic of the whole Avatar worldview: naturalistic materialism. There is no world but this one, so puffs of plants can be called 'spirits'. Eywa -- God -- is nothing more than the stringing together of enough plants, animals and Na'vi as to be incomprehensible by any one person. She would say, God is not different in kind, only degree.

Next in the movie, Jake begins to recapitulate his experience before the falls. He slaps plants and giggles like a school-girl. Then, warriors on horses are a threat display, and he must stand down. Next, as he hid in the base of a tree from the Thanator, he "hides" in the base of a Great Tree. Both involve running, and again the celestial bodies signal a change of worldview.

The natives hoot and holler like Native Americans, just for those of you who haven't gotten the blantently obvious subtext of the movie. Their light, however, is orange on the Great Leonopteryx's skull and on the judging Father figure. But it is mixed with the green of the Link Room, his safe cocoon, which is the color that wins out as he falls asleep a Na'vi.

His identity as one of them is already well under way: he said he WAS a Marine. In the beginning, he had said such a thing never left you. Which is it?

Pondering Presuppositional Perspicuity

2010-12-06T23:29:00.001-08:00

As I work my way through Bryan Chappell's audio series and book, Christ Centered Preaching, I am forced to work through my issues with Redemptive Historical preaching. I am frankly troubled by the reactionary nature of much expositional preaching and much closer to the Anglican position than to the Reformed Baptist. This has become most apparent to me in the chapter "Components of Exposition", pages 84 and 85. Figure 4.1 is a tipped scale, with "Information" out-weighing "Organization, Exegesis, Delivery, Illustration and Application". Contrasting this, Figure 4.2 is a tipped scale with the fulcrum labeled "Exposition" and "Application" out-weighing "Organization, Exegesis, Delivery and Illustration". Chappell quotes David L. Larson as saying, "A true expository message, however, uses all its resources to move application."
Perhaps I have never been exposed to sermons of the type he is decrying. I suppose in the hallowed precincts of tenured academia there are men with "Rev." titularly afore their name who expound texts from a believing point of view yet never once let their feet touch the rude soil of contemporary life. However, that hardly seems a problem in the contemporary preaching scene. I wonder where a majority of my fellow Covenant seminarians are coming from, if not the same milieu as me? Tim Keller, John Piper, D.A. Carson, Matt Chandler, Mark Driscoll, R.C. Sproul and Phil Ryken top my list of popular men whose sermons I recall. They are all in reaction to the TV preachers and mega-church moguls who peddle all application sermons.
The reason Chappell's illustrations are so misleading (in my mind) is because they mix apples and oranges. Where did "information" disappear to in 4.2? Isn't the traditional definition of faith notitia, assensus, fiducia (knowledge, agreement, trust)? How can information/knowledge drop out of the picture? How can you be transformed by the renewing of your mind without the facts?
To be fair, Dr. Chappell must mean that the conveyance of "bare facts" never saved anyone. On page 69, he cautions against constantly preaching from 'hard passages', lest your flock come to think of the Bible as an obscure maze they cannot navigate without you. I realized that this is a large part of how I feel about the Bible! The consistent lesson I have learned from my mentor and the likes of R.C. Sproul (even John Piper) is that I have been reading large passages of the Bible wrongly. When I saw what I believe, I immediately questioned myself, "Am I failing in my stated subscription to the Westminster Standards, specifically in regards to the clarity or perspicuity of Scripture?" I was genuinely worried, so I looked it up:
All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
Oh. That is much more nuanced than I had at first remembered. Some places in Scripture are plain about salvation (i.e. The Gospel) but not all. Some places are clear-cut and easy to understand, but not all. I had indeed understood enough of the Gospel to be saved when I was a knuckle-dragging, Semi-Pelagian, Bible-less neophyte, but there is no need to treat all of the Bible as if it were aimed at that person. I stand by my High Church position that the Liturgy -- NOT the Sermon -- plainly exposes the Gospel from week to week. The sermon is to expound/make clear the Text, whether or not the Gospel is bluntly stated therein.
Part of my freak-out was due to the very subtitle of this blog, presupposing perspicuity. If I had unwittingly disavowed my own appellation, I don't think I could've lived with myself. But I hadn't. This made me think about the other half of my superscription, relating to Presuppositionalism. Grumpy, stogy ole Van Til had rescued me from Zen Buddhism by his fierce insistence that there is no coherent way to make sense of this world without God and His Word. There are no "bare facts" he would say. In God we find the answer to the question of "The One and the Many" in the equal ultimacy of them both. The Trinity is, at the most fundamental level one and at the most fundamental level three. So too the Bible. It is one message so simple as to be statable in a mere sentence: "We are saved by God from God for God". Yet it is so many "words" that is takes 66 books to say and cannot be reduced to a mere pamphlet. Both are true, but mere men can only say one thing at a time, well.

I am planning on attending Covenant and will then take Dr. Chappell's class, so I don't want to gear up for an argument. However, it was helpful to read this somewhat angry/shot-from-the-hip blog post by a (SBC?) man who held nothing back. Sometimes it is helpful to hear from another context.

Revolutionary Review

2010-11-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

Jessica and I watched a wonderfully depressing movie the other day, Revolutionary Road. Leonardo Decaprio and Kate Winslet reunite a decade after Titanic for more tragedy and heartache. Together they portray a 1950's couple who once fell dreamily in love and now find themselves lost in suburbia. He is first vaguely -- later solidly -- settled in his role as a mindless cog in the corporate machinery. She is a washed out actress who turns all her hopes for herself into a fantasy about him "finding himself". Their fights (and dialogue in general) are epic, articulate and incredibly personal. No one should have any trouble finding themselves in these characters, all the while hating them and empathizing with them in equal measure.

The context within which I heard this movie was Tim Keller's Prodigal Son sermon series. Remembering to put the parable in the larger context of Luke 15: it is a story aimed at the Pharisee's, even though we tend to focus on the younger brother. Decaprio's character sees working for his family as a drag, just like the older brother said he "slaved" for the Father. Worse, by the end of the movie, he is actually satisfied with mindless work and money for its own sake. For her part, Kate plays the younger brother who thinks she will only be fulfilled if there are no limits. When this dream is taken away from her, she sleeps around with any man and performs a risky self-abortion, from which she dies.

While we watched the movie, it was painfully obvious that both characters were horribly in the wrong. Serving other people -- without self-determining what is best for them -- is not even on the radar. Conspicuously absent until the end are the children, who ought to be a priority. I started to wonder if we would see them escape to Paris (the destination Kate's character has pinned all her hopes on) but it would've been superfluous, since nowhere on Earth could've made her happy, so lofty were her dreams. Ultimately, the smallness of his "heaven" and the unreality of hers betray an abysmally tiny view of God.

"Do whatever you want -- absolute freedom -- and you will be happy." That is the preeminent lie of our age. Don't watch the special feature of Revolutionary Road, or you will see how all those involved thought it was clear cut case of Winslet's character being right and Decaprio's being wrong. We live in reaction to the artificiality of the 50's, blissfully unaware how far to the other extreme we have gone. Conformity to the Law cannot save you and doing whatever you want can't make you happy. Unless God himself is you delight, you will never be satiated. Unless God saves you, you will not be saved.

Wannabe Presbyterians Do It

2010-11-10T15:23:00.000-08:00

Finally, I've stumbled upon the 'why'. I've railed against it in the past -- perhaps going a little past polemics into hatred -- but I never understood what motivated it. Even as it grew variegated like some indestructible hydra, I was left wondering how it even began. But the persnickety OPC dudes over at the Reformed Forum hit the nail on the head and identified the heart origins of multi-site churches: faulty ecclesiology.

So imagine you're a Baptist. You come to church and your elders are Arminian, your people are isolationists and your oversight is non-existent. It might take you 15 years to clean up the funk, if ever. Imagination aside, that is precisely what John Piper faced and overcame. If you're a Congregationalist, you have to re-invent the wheel every time you church plant. Than it comes to you: why bother?
Why not just duplicate your church, only replacing those without any authority, the congregants. Your doctrinal statement is simply photocopied. Your ethos is emailed. Your zeitgeist is retweeted. To borrow a page from the old Napster:

Now, stop imaging and get back to being a Presbyterian. If something is going wrong at one church, you take them to their presbytery/classis. If something is wrong with a presbytery/classis, you take them to the General Assembly/Synod. When you want to start a new church, you send a God-ordained man from one church, under the supervision of presbytery/classis. He goes with doctrinal standards and a Book of Church order. He doesn't reinvent the wheel because he relies on Godly counsel, the Church Fathers throughout the ages and his denomination. Elders must subscribe to the same standards or they can't be elders. Why would you want to struggle and/or die without these predefined structures?!

Most importantly, however, you've got a man acting as the presbyter/elder/bishop/pastor is described in the NT. He shepherds the people, not merely conducts an "air war". He knows his sheep by name and they trust him. As every elementary homiletics student could tell you, you need

logic (logos)
feeling (pathos) and
perceived empathy (ethos)

to be a successful, persuasive speaker. A preacher who doesn't listen to his flock isn't a preacher. In fact, he's barely even a speaker. Beaming in your Max Headroom isn't pastoring. It might be good for evangelization, but it is not shepherding. Let's follow the Biblical pattern for church layout and government (ecclesiology) and be presbyterian. Not Baptist Replicators/Borg.

Wright Wrong

2010-11-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

I know a number of my readers are avid N.T. Wright fans who claim he has been read wrongly on justification. I was prepared to accept that claim on their word, given that I've read less than 1% of his prodigious writings. I even thought Piper was over reacting. However, Liam Goligher wrote a very damning blog post on Reformation 21 the other day which is worth repeating. (Vindication is Wright's preferred term over Justification).

Vindication 'is God's declaration that a person is in the right, i. e. that the person's sins have been forgiven and that he or she is part of the single covenant family promised to Abraham'. Wright emphatically denies that justification is on the basis of the imputation of Christ's righteousness. 'It is not God's own righteousness or Christ's own righteousness that is reckoned to God's redeemed people but, rather, the fresh status of "covenant member" and/or "justified sinner", which is accredited to those who are in Christ, who have heard the gospel and responded with "the obedience of faith"'.

Dr. Goligher clarified in an email to me that the bold text (my emphasis) is from Justification in Perspective, ed. Bruce McCormack, (Grand Rapids, Baker and Rutherford House, 2006) p 253. This is very, very wrong stuff. I've never encountered Covenant Theology gone too far before, but this may be it. It sounds like he is saying God just calls you righteous without doing anything (to His son). This is the same junk I hear in evangelism when people say, "Couldn't God just forgive us without punishing anybody?" Double imputation or nothing.

Deutero-Superman Music

2010-11-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

So I watched Superman Returns. It's more of a remake or an homage than it is a sequel. The music is straight replayed most of the time. The plot is carbon-copied. Whole camera moves and scenes are transplanted 30 years, scarcely revised. Kevin Spacey is the only original thing it seems.

Why is this bad? Because you can't pretend the intervening three decades didn't happen. The speech near the end of Kill Bill 2 changed the way we saw Clark Kent. Neo embodied the übermensch, the original "super" man. Newspapers are no longer the edifice in society they once were. Smallville, Crash Test Dummies, Christopher Reeve's quadriplegia - none of these can be 'undone' in the viewers eyes. Superman was nearly outmoded and anachronistic in 1978, the year of this author's birth. In 2006, it was an ode to naivety.

What moves me to write all this is the glorious heights to which Superman Returns could've aspired. Lois Lane won the Pulitzer for "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman". What is the world? Why doesn't it need Superman? Why did it ever think it did? How was it wrong or what changed? What does the world need? Is there any savior who could actually save the world?

In his brilliant work, Deep Exegesis, Peter Leithart says Scripture is like music. Critics complain that repetition is desirable in music, but not in literature. To be sure, Leithart sites highly poetic sources to validate his claim, but nevertheless manages to prove his point. An endless stream of new characters, new topics and new words is bad writing. Like good music, good writing should loop back on itself and plum the depths of earlier ideas. Like Bach and Beethoven, the Biblical Author delves deeper and deeper into recurring topics, showing their inexhaustibility like a fractal.

I was struck by these very notions as I tried to outline Deuteronomy this week. I tried to find the beginnings and ends of sections by looking for repeated phrases and ideas. I found so many I got lost. I attempted to isolate structures and found multiple, overlapping ones in each chapter. I tried to understand brief allusions to prior narratives and exposition. I ended up rereading most of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers.

God is not averse to sequels. Our Protestant Bibles list Ruth eighth, but her story is really a much later vignette into the already-told-story of the Judges. Chronicles starts all the way back in Genesis and goes all the way to the end of the Exile. Our Lord and Savior's story was obviously deemed compelling enough to warrant three similar and one dissimilar retelling. But there is never one instance of boring, dead reliving. Never tell a story the same way twice. Never pretend the last five minutes didn't just happen. God's true stories inhabit the true world and are as alive at it is. Do not make the Lord of the Story appear mundane and lifeless.

Social Midas Touch

2010-10-19T00:03:00.000-07:00

The time for happy endings has past. In the 80's, Revenge of the Nerds ended with the nerds getting the girls and love ensuing. Not anymore. Our age is the Fightclub age, the age of destruction and devastation. We are now such slaves, such utter devotees to our idols that -- though we know full well they will destroy us -- we cling to them to the bitter, bitter end.

Such was my feeling as I left Social Network (Roger Ebert), the new movie about the birth of Facebook tonight. The opening is a rapid-fire, machine-gun exchange of dialogue between Matt Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, which terminates in her breaking up with him. In the end, his company is worth $25 billion and has 500 million participants. But Zuckerberg sits in an empty office and submits a 'friend request' to his girlfriend of years before, periodically hitting refresh to see if she accepts. The sad, pathetic emptiness is palpable at the terminus of this whirlwind film.
A friend of mine and I sat down to talk before the film and I asked him why he quit blogging and why he hasn't joined Facebook. He said he want to, that he missed authentic connections with people like himself, but he was afraid of being found and read by the wrong people about the wrong thing. I tried to say he was using the wrong tool for the job, that Facebook is as public as speaking in the town square, but he had a paradoxical notion stuck in his head. He wanted to be real with people, and to connect with strangers, but never get burned for having mentioned an inappropriate thought. I said he wanted his cake and eat it too.

But the Matt Zuckerberg character wants the same thing. He started Facebook to get back at the jocks who excluded him. He accepted the mantle of Timberlake's desire to stick it to the Man. But most of all, he wanted to show the girl that he was not a jerk, that he deserved love. Yet the way he chose to do all that was by being the biggest jerk possible and screwing them all over with his superior hacking chops. The very means he employed made it impossible.

King Midas had the same dilemma. He lacked some aspect of happiness and he thought wealth would bring it to him. His wish was granted and everything he touched turned to gold. At first it was great, as he made golden crowns and golden thrones and golden trees. But golden apples were uneatable and soon his wife and daughters were glistening statues in the sun.
Midas repented of his foolishness and prayed that his curse would be lifted. Baptized in the river Pactolus, his powers were removed. His mad wish was spent on the sandy banks, turning them golden for years to come. The only way out was to be washed clean.

I know so many young men in my generation who feel jilted by the world, myself chief among them. We were told we were special, that the world was ours for the taking and that we deserved it. "Everything you need is inside you. Don't let any external problem get in your way!" The Gospel of Self-Esteem, Self-Confidence. We didn't get it; our names weren't written in the stars. As soon as we slipped from our parent's grasp and tried to stand on our own, it hit us. "The world is not my oyster and I am nobody special. It can't be my fault, so it must be the world's. Now my success will be in how much of this god-forsaken world I can tear down. I (secretly) long to watch it all burn."
Listen, young men, to those who have pressed on in the service of their gods past glory into ignominy. Better yet, listen to those precious few who got all they ever asked for, even before it all turned to bitterest ash! "Is this all there is? Is there nothing more? Is this all that I was made for? There must be more!" Do you hear what they are saying? Do you understand yourself and the nature of the world? What we ultimately seek is not here. What satisfies cannot be found with human hands. Do not give up: you can't anyway. The hardest, greatest, highest thing you are called to do is wait for your heavenly Father's embrace. Have faith. Look to him for satisfaction. EXPECT TO BE FRUSTRATED AS LONG AS YOU LIVE. Your biggest problem is inside you, and without divine intervention you cannot be saved. It's a bad as you fear to fear, but he is as great as your dare to dream.

Sermon's Matter ... Just not the Most

2010-10-12T22:28:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I need some caveats, so let me begin. Sermons matter. Sermons matter a lot. Faithful preaching of the Word is a mark of the Church. It's worth firing a minister over and leaving a church over. If the Reformation had been about nothing else, it would've been worth it. I agree with the change of architecture in the Renaissance from emphasizing the Host to emphasizing the pulpit. Amen and amen.

But the sermon cannot be all your hope and stay for a service. Unless you're prepared to say that the OT temple services were not Evangelistic and were unchristian (which you would be a fool to say), then there is something crucial for us to learn from Leviticus 1:1-9. That something is summed up in one word: liturgy. Liturgy means what you do in what order. That is a sufficient definition because it leaves open the possibility of good liturgy and bad liturgy. What it doesn't allow is someone to say, "We have no liturgy." Everyone has one, only some are Biblical.

With that in mind, I present to you a second 10 minute clip of Mark Dever, Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald:

There is so much wrong here, but let me just pick one topic. If someone hears your sermon and says, "I could've gotten that in a mosque or a synagogue or a temple or a shrine," they haven't dwelt you the Death-Blow-of-Doom-which-should-make-you-go-cry-in-the-corner-until-your-mommy-comes-and-gets-you. And let me tell you why.

I LOVE John Piper's definition of preaching: expository exultation. Expository is not the opposite of topical, it's the opposite of impositional. A sermon should be a setting-forth of what-is-there. God's Word is powerful and there are plenty of curses for those who add to or subtract from it. It doesn't need your help. Exultation means your glorying in it. A sermon is not so much about teaching and unpacking as much as it is a chance for the congregation to practice reveling in God's Word.

There are lot of places in the Bible where Jesus is set before us plainly. No one would argue with that. What is (apparently) controversial is that there are places where glomming on the birth, ministry, death or resurrection of Jesus would be wrong. Esther is the premiere example, since it is an entire book of the Bible that mentions God ZERO times. Long parts of Proverbs, Job, the Song, James and Ecclesiastes are Wisdom Literature, the kind that was common in their day. A clear explanation of WHAT IS THERE IN THE TEXT might be carried off my a clever Jew, Muslim, Mormon or less. It is not an insult to say, "I could've heard that sermon from a very clever heathen," in certain cases.

God is present in all of the Bible, like he is present in all of reality. Quantum Physics and Biomolecular Engineering speak of God, and so does practical, daily living/wisdom. Of course the Bible spends most of it's time laying out the Plan of Redemption, but there is a time and place for railing against those who presume on God's grace and giving them no quarter to retreat into easy-believe-ism. James sounds like the opposite of Romans because those people -- in the wisdom of God -- needed to get off their duffs and do. They knew grace and where trampling on it. Such messages are not what everyone needs to hear all the time, but that's why sessions/consistories need to chose their church's sermon series with such care.

All that being said, most of the Bible does point very easily and quickly to Jesus, indeed the Triune God of Reformed/orthodox theology. I have demurred from the label Redemptive Historical Preaching in the past (and will continue to do so) but there is hope that not everyone in the that camp is so reactionary. Here is Bryan Chapell, my homiletics professor-to-be:

"I have attempted to clarify the redemptive context of "Christ-centered" messages in two ways. First, by indicating that the term itself is a syndoche - standing not only for references to Christ's incarnation or death on the cross, but for the entire matrix of God's redemptive work, which finds its culminating expression in Christ's person and work. Second, by indicating that a message is Christ-centered not because it makes creative mention of an aspect of Jesus' life or death, but because it discloses an aspect of God's redeeming nature (evident in the text) that is ultimately understood, fulfilled, and/or accomplished in Christ." Christ Centered Preaching, second edition, p15

I would differ only slightly, though I'm sure Dr. Chapell would agree with what I'm about to say too. All things are fulfilled in Christ, but most things are going on to be MORE fulfilled in Redemptive History. That is why Paul can say that Satan will soon be crushed under OUR feet (Rom 16), even though he was dispatched on the cross. In another place, Jesus is THE seed of Abraham and yet were are the SEEDS of Abraham, those who believe.

In summary, I think my "life verse" is quickly becoming Psalm 73:17. Asaph saw the end of non-believers versus the end of the righteous by going to the house of God. Sermon or no sermon, the worship service should ring loud as a bell with the eschatological definition of all things. The all encompassing embrace of redemptive history IS the grand hermeneutic of all things, but we are not smart enough to see it in every vignette of life, OR EVEN THE BIBLE. Preach what is there. God has given us his whole counsel and we are responsible for it all. Do not turn the cross into a cataract.

Mega Churches are Unbiblical

2010-10-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

As I've blogged before, I really don't get Mark Driscoll's multi-site church thing. Despite that fact that one of my good friends is a campus pastor of a Mars Hill campus, it still seems to me to be MASSIVELY egotistical. Mark Dever recently sat down with Driscoll and James MacDonald for this Gospel Coalition video:

Seriously? This is an argument? He shouts down Dever on the definition of ekklesia: that's not a rationale, it's just badgering.
What also killed me was Driscoll's attitude about preaching. At minute 5, around 45 seconds he says "I don't listen to the audience." WHAT?! How is that -- in any way -- preaching? I guess I'm assuming he sees some difference between preaching and evangelism, which I perhaps shouldn't assume. At a real ekklesia (assembly), the preaching pastor listens to the elders who know the people and they decide what to preach through next AS A SESSION/CONSISTORY. Despite Driscoll's protests that each of his campus pastors is a "first among equals", how can anything like this happen at a Mars Hill campus? What is Olympia decides "Our people are complacent and uncharitable. How about a series on James?" while Albuquerque says "The congregation is heavily into works righteousness and divided. What about a series through 1 Corinthians or Romans?"
Also, MacDonald and Driscoll aren't seriously considering Dever's question on whether they encourage other men to preach. How developed is someone going to be who preaches 15 times a year, compared to Mark? Moreover, do their people walk away each week with the feeling that Driscoll is shepherding their lives through Scripture or the other man? Acts 29 makes a big deal about a church planter needing to be "THE MAN", but a site-pastor will never be anything close as long as he plays second fiddle to Driscoll. More like second tuba.
What Jim and Driscoll flatly confirm is that it is about ego and influence. They plant churches where they have no clout and they go multi-site where they do. Senior pastor's should be at the core of 200 people's lives, not center stage in 15,000 people's TV screens. My pastor prays for me at least every week, as well as everyone else in the church. If you can't do that, it's time to church plant. Period.

Alternative Confession of Sin

2010-10-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

I worked out today at the gym, and My Own Worst Enemy came on, by Lit.

Being the Driscoll-esque nut that I am, I imagined the sanctified, Reformed, Liturgical, Confession of Sin lyrics adapted to fit the music:

Can you forgive, O Lord, the things I've said and I've done?

For you, my God, are merciful.

I now repent of what I thought and what I thought to do.

Please tell me why:

I do what I would not do, and that

which I would not, that I do

Wretched man that I am, who can

save my soul (soul)

It's no surprise to me I am my own worst enemy,

But Jesus Christ delivers such from sin as me

I serve the law of God with mind, but with m'flesh

still serve Sin

Please tell me why:

I do what I would not do, and that

which I would not, that I do

Wretched man that I am, who can

save my soul (soul)

I know, I'm nuts.

Redemptive Historical

2010-10-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

My last post was not well thought out, so I thought I'd better try again.

What is Redemptive Historical preaching? First of all, we must distinguish it from preaching that takes into account redemptive history. There is more of a difference than mere capitol letters. Redemptive history is the unfolding plan of God through time. Being mindful of that in preaching would involve recognizing what epoch a text takes place in, and what role the text in question plays in advancing Biblical history.
Second, there is a difference of perspective on "where is the middle". I recently got into it with @llanphere regarding the famous quote from Martin Lloyd-Jones, "If you've preached Romans 1-7 and people don't think you're an Antinomian, you didn't do it right." It is equally true that 'if you've preached through James and people don't think you're a Legalist, you didn't do it right'. One extreme is not more excusable than the other. One heresy is not bad and the other "almost OK". Scripture does not shrink from enjoining believers -- after they have been redeemed. While it is true that the imperative does follow the indicative, it doesn't have to be that the former is far larger than latter. For example, the giving of the Law in Exodus 20 consists of two verses of redemptive history followed by 15 verses of "moralism". Different parts of the Bible were aimed at different peoples; sometimes it is needful to speak only of grace, sometimes only of action.
Third, while Sunday School teachers of the past may have ruinously used moralistic exemplars, it is nevertheless the case that the Bible says, "Be like so-and-so" and so-and-so is not Jesus. "Be a Daniel" may be a bad song, but it doesn't mean that we ought not emulate him. Joseph, Daniel, Boaz, Paul (not Saul) and others are shown without any mention of their sins, not because we are to think they had none, but because they are role models for us. "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ" could've been written "Be imitators of Christ even as I am" but wasn't.

How is such a balance possible? Won't we either fall into moralism or antinomianism? Only a philosophy of Christian Dialecticism will prohibit such a fall. Systematicians will always be inferior to experienced pastors in this respect because only the preacher can be comfortable expositing the text before them this week and its apparent opposite the week after. Those who value "undifferentiated monads" of doctrine do see that God hs made the world out of fiercely opposing, seemingly contradictory truths. We are saved by grace, and that not off ourselves. At the same time -- both being 100% true -- there will be a judgment according to works (Rev 20:11-15; 2 Cor 5:10; Ecc 12:14; Rom 14:12; Mt 12:36-37; Jn 5:28-29). We are justified apart from anything we do, and some will be given 10 cities and some 5. Our minds cannot hold these two realities in their fullness in our minds at one time. Like God's sovereignty and Man's responsibility, we should only preach one at a time and go no further in reconciling these them then the Bible does (which is to say, not at all!).

It God had wanted all sermons to be the same at heart, he would've given us a 100 page Bible at most. Instead, he allowed 71% of his inspired word to be written without knowing the same of Jesus. In case there was any doubt, the believers of the Ancient Epoch are held up to us as models of faith: Hebrews 11. Let me be blunt: you can be saved without knowing the name of Jesus Christ, as Abraham was. This is true not in spite of Isaiah 42:8 and Acts 4:12, but because of them. Abraham was saved by the righteousness of Christ. We do not need to alter the text of Genesis to make it Christian. Do not be afraid to preach the text in front of you. God made Psalm 88 be authored without resolution. The drama of redemption should present in your liturgy (Psalm 73:17). Sermons are free to be whatever God wants them to be.

The Good, the Bad and the Boring

2010-10-01T22:29:00.000-07:00

I know I'm about three years behind the times, but I just listened to the Westminster Preaching Conference of 2007 and it was amazing in several extremes. Carl Trueman badly condensed somethings he said much better six months before about John Owen. Dan Doriani did a fantastic job outlining some better ways to be balanced in regard to weight given to certain types of texts over others. But Tuck Bartholomew stole my attention with his mouth-breathing-fanboy take on a Tim Keller sermon, a sermon which exemplifies why I will not call myself a Redemptive Historical preacher.

I have always taken it as a truism -- learned from R.C. Sproul -- that we are to let the clearer passages of Scripture interpret the less clear. I think Dan Doriani would regard that as a sound method as well. However, as he points out in his lecture, it is not so clear that the ethical, propositional parts of the Bible ARE the clearer portions, and the narratives are the less clear. As I saw so clearly teaching Sunday School through the Bible, Exodus 19:2-Numbers 10:10 -- the focal point of the Books of Moses -- is among the least understood and most difficult parts to interpret in many people's minds. Law about Hebrew slave girls and building fences on your roof?!
In short, narrative and ethical sections should be set in equal ultimacy. Dan's examples are things like "God is Love", a clear statement from an epistle. And yet how can we know what love is without examples from the Gospels and the rest of Scripture to fill in the picture? I know this is true from my recent attempts to write a sermon: even if you illustrate a point perfectly from a flawless chain of Scripture quotations, you really need to some it up (even using the same words) again at the end. Didactic vs. Story become another example of Form vs. Content. Both are Both/And's not Either/Or's.

As an aside, this is the reason I enjoy so much of what the Federal Vision guys come up with but can not step into their camp. James Jordan, Douglas Wilson and Peter Leithart's love of chiasm, typology, the Quadriga and such are really focuses on narrative, returns to Story. They are poo-pooing the Enlightenment worship of the Left Brain. They eschew obfuscatory and superfluous erudition without Meta-narrative. The Ordinary Means crowd, however, are also great to listen to (most of the time) since they are affirming truth and exposing it's contrary. I find I am ripped apart by my choices, unfortunately, as I tell the FV guys to just produce one unambiguous statement and the PRTS/WSC folks to quit longing for the One, True Systematic Theology which can replace the artsy-fartsy BIBLE. Ugh. On to the point which will piss everyone off.

Disagreeing with Tim Keller is a sure fire way to get in trouble, and I'm doing it after a short, 18 hour day. Plunging on, I must say I liked a lot of what Dr. Bartholomew had to say. He echoed a lot of Doriani's points and is worth listening to, right up until the end. The sermon he is rehashing by Tim Keller was preached at the PCA GA a few years back. While mostly convicting and challenging to me in ways I haven't begun to address, the point of the sermon centers on Genesis 18:33. Abraham has haggled down to 10 righteous men needing to be found in Sodom to prevent the destruction of the city. Keller says Abraham stopped at ten because he knew he could not find one man perfectly righteous. The One. Jesus.
What?!?!?! Ten so-so righteous people could save the city. Abraham had no picture of the specific man Jesus. There was never anything in the text to suggest we were moving up in awesomeness of those found in Sodom. Instead it was always about the gracious character of God WITH ABRAHAM. Where did Keller get his though from? From his Ed Clowney radical commitment to Redemptive Historical Preaching. Instead of learning what the text says, Jesus is glommed on top, skipping the lesson the original hearers/participants would've learned.

This is now an either/or situation. I believe Luke 24 is there to shape how we read the whole Bible (OT and NT) but it us not a carte blanche to destroy the grammatical-historical meaning of the text to the original hearers. Add more meaning in your application section, but always as an outworking of the text in the hearer's lives. David slept with Bathsheba and murdered Uriah, but was counted worthy of God's favor four hundred years after he died (2 Kings 20:6). Where would you EVER get that Abraham was talking about these people meeting perfect righteousness in this text?
When I preach in 9 days, I will not say David knew Jesus' name or make an unconnected jump to Calvary at the last minute. If Abraham knew the same good news as me beforehand (Gal 3:8) and could be the father of the faithful 2000 years before Christ lived, then he must've know essential things about the character of God -- enough to be saved -- without a page of Scripture or knowing Jesus name. And that much of the Gospel saved him and his household. Luke 24 doesn't mean you impose an artificially glued-on Jesus to each text, it means you look for him as he's there. More often than not this mean going Van Tillian/Transcendental and asking, "What must be true for this text to be true?" Even clear prophecies of Jesus -- even the life of Jesus in the Gospels -- must be approached this way. "What kind of a God is this, who sends such worthy men to suffer and die for such rebellious idiots?" We were learning about God, not Abraham per se, in Genesis 18. God graciously answers impudent prayers (like Gideon's two-fold fleece requests). This is about God, like rest of the Bible, like Jesus.

Update: Of course it wasn't R.C. Sproul who came up with "let the clear interpret the unclear". As a recent Al Mohler blog post reveals, it was Augustine.

Back into Greek

2010-09-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

The last Harry Potter movie (the first of a two parter) debuts next month and I need to get back into Greek. These two realities are not as far apart as you might think. Since I own a copy of Andrew Wilson's amazing translation of The Philosopher's Stone into Attic Greek, I can enjoy two things at once.
In an effort to stay on track, I will be presenting excerpts here, with literal translations. His excellent vocabulary list is a must.

ἀπεκοιμήθη μὲν οὖν οὗτος, νυστάζοντα δ᾽ οὐκ ἄν εἶδες* τὸν ἐπὶ τῷ τειχίῳ αἴλουρον, ἀκίνητον δ᾽ ὥσπερ εἰκόνα τινὰ ἀσκαρδαμυκτὶ βλέποντα κατὰ τήν ὁδόν. οὐ γὰρ ἐμέλησεν αὐτῷ οὔτε κρότου ἐγγύθεν ἀπ‘ ὀχήματος γενομένου οὔ γλαυκῶν δυοῖν ὑπέρθε καταπετομένων, οὐδ‘ ἐκινήθη οὐδὲν πρίν γε μέσῃ τῇ νυκτὶ κατεῖδεν ἄνδρα ἐν ὁδῷ. ὁ δ‘ ἄφνω ἐφάνη κατὰ σιωπὴν οὕτως ὥστε δόξαι ἁνακύψας ἀπὸ τῆς γαίας. ὁ δε‘ αἴλουρος τὰς ὀφρῦς ἀνεσπακὼς ἔσηνέ τι τῇ οὐρᾷ.

* I think this is a typo and should be εἶδεν

Then he fell asleep, as dozing, and did not see the cat on the wall, just as motionless as some statue, looking unblinkingly at the road. Indeed, it did not regard him, nor the nearby slam coming from a car, nor two owls flying down from above, not even moving once until the very middle of the night, having seen a man in the road. And he appeared so all of a sudden that opinions were he emerged from the earth. But the cat, having puckered her eyebrows, wagged her tail some.

Update:
This is turning into much more a beast than I thought. Sophokeys was very necessary and I had to resort to the Morphological Parser more than once. My skills are lacking. :-(

Colossians 4

2010-09-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

I did a study a while back for small groups on Colossians 4. It's a PDF.

Blogin' Dudes

2010-09-12T21:35:00.000-07:00

I've happened upon some unique blogs lately, so I've compiled these introductions.

Bull Artistry
Michael Bull is an Australian graphics designer who has made a couple of cool books and maintains a super slick blog. Get this: he's a Reformed Baptist into the FV! Is that not the weirdest? His repeated refrain is that the opening section of the Bible (The Creation Story - Genesis 1:1-2:3) is the unique guide to the much of the rest of the Bible. The seven days of creation follow both an ABCA'B'C'D outline on the surface and an ABCDC'B'A' outline underneath. The seven calendar holidays of the OT follow this order as well.
Mike has lots of cool finds and is an unabashed fanboy of Leithart and Jordan. I have found them both to be treasure troves in regard to typology and parts of the OT not conventionally understood (e.g. Leviticus, Chronicles, etc.). As I recently commented, I prefer to use other tools in other places. John Piper has popularized 'arcing' - there is even a website tool! - which is the best for dissecting Paul and other dense, logical arguments. The other tool is the more ordinary chiasm/chiasmus. Mike's blog, however, is a great visual feast and an amazing source of well thought-out posts. Check it out.

The Voice of Stephen
Moisés Silva is a fantastic theologian and an amazing linguist. His book Biblical Words and Their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics is so amazing, I still re-read it biannually. So, of course, I was pleasantly blown away to discover a mouth-breathing-fan-boy blog! I was even more surprised to find out that the fan-boy is a humorous Puerto Rican! I was knocked off my chair to see he attends a Serbian Orthodox church!
The blog is worth reading alone for the awesomeness of Silva and the lengthy quotes Esteban provides. One example of the clarity of thought is Moises' refutation of the logical error inherent in the denail the imputation of the active righteousness of Christ. Go buy a Silva book!

As a barely related tangent, let me offer this vignette in response to a jest by Mr. Vasquez. Why are some people so interested in narrowly defining the word "reformed" so as to exclude as many people as possible? The same people who would be cantankerous about the term "Reformed Baptist" would hesitate before unloading so vehemently on "Reformed Episcopalians/Anglicans". That an Old Slavonic church member can show such interest in Reformed soteriology should give us pause! Why should we narrow a word's semantic range, especially when a word with the definition some seek already exists: Presbyterian! That word has a rich array of meanings different from "confessional", so I admit you may be forced to use three words to get the effect the want from one, "Reformed." The Cumberland Presbyterians are Arminian. There were Calvinist Wesleyans. Luther(ans) wrote creeds and catechisms which remain Reformed classics. As the diagram illustrates, there are three words you have use, and you can't restrict the top circle to the overlap of all three. Don't subscribe to the Westminsters' narrowing of a perfectly fine term.

The Futility Closest
Not Christian, but just darn cool. These guys unearth mathematical puzzles, random trivia and more. Worth subscribing to.

Bybull Prez Doodz

I have a strange picture in my mind regarding this denomination. On the one hand, history lessons teaches it to be a schismatic bunch, divisive over non-gospel issues such as alcohol and millennialism. On the other hand, every one I know personally from among them is very kind, warm hearted and Christocentrically ecumenical. Who knew?!

The Whole Counsel
Kris Kord is a generous and godly man who blogs about theology, despite having a very busy life. We could all learn from his devotion and studiousness.
Providence
This schmuck is terrible human being who should be burned at the stake. No, I'm just kidding! Tim Prussic is the reason I'm Reformed and a very cogent blogger and theologian. Comment well and you may earn the coveted "Hubba, hubba!" The man needs his own bishopric.
Star Wars Lookin' Dude
Even more funny than this picture, ~~Jon Spach~~ Jason Anspach is a fan-boy of WRS seminary in Tacoma, where I erstwhile wished I could go. He is very astute in both theology and culture and will make a fantastic minister. Check this guy out.

The Thinker Unthought

2010-08-30T21:49:00.001-07:00

If materialism is true, all our thoughts are produced by purely material antecedents. These are quite blind, and are just as likely to produce falsehood as truth. We thus have no reason for believing any of our conclusions — including the truth of materialism, which is therefore a self-contradictory hypothesis.

– J.E. McTaggart, Philosophical Studies, 1934

The Thinker Unthought | Futility Closet

Reformed Airbender

2010-08-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

I stayed up until 11 p.m. to finish Sozin's Comet, the season 3 and grande finale to Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was not worth it. I know the fan's will be angered by that comment, so this post is an apologetic of my rejection of the series. It is juvenile, trite, bad narrative and bad theology.

My first objection to the Last Airbender is the teenage attitude that pervades the entire series. After all the Buddhist/Hindu lessons, after the drama, excitement and tears are over, the last scene of the whole show tells you what it's about: teenage love. If I wanted that crap, I would've read/watched Twilight. The jokes and goofiness are meant to keep the interest of the teenage audience, and this juvenile spirit wins out in the end. Episodes about feeling bad at parties, having boyfriends/girlfriends are placed in the last season, at the height of emotional pitch and fervor. Unlike important themes, the lover angle is developed and given screen time. The values of the target audience have become the creator's.

The next stupid element of the show is the trite humor. Babylon 5 is still the gold standard of "novel on television." The first season was full of cutesy episodes which stood alone and didn't necessarily contribute to the multi-season plot arcs. But the frivolousness comes to a near halt at the start of season 2 and doesn't start again until the denouement season, season 5. But in Avatar, it never stops. Even in the self-reflective episode, The Ember Island Players, Sokka's sarcastic humor isn't ridiculed, it is exalted. I wish the writers had decided to grow-up and mature the audience, instead of staying in their mindset. When Iroh cries for his dead son, I almost wept too. I wish that emotional investment had been repaid, but it was spurred by events in real life deeper than the writers knew how to deal with.

What makes a good story? Setting up your plot elements appropriately without giving too much away, building up and paying off. Bad preparation means audiences call your resolution a deus ex machina. And this is exactly what the most sympathetic of reviews is forced to call the ending. Conversely, if you project your ending too plainly, everyone says they saw the ending coming. And Avatar gets that too. In the Matrix Revolutions, the hero glows before he undoes the bad guy at his own game. Neo talks to the real Deus Ex Machina, not a Lion Turtle. His self-sacrifice has been projected since the first Matrix movie. People may not love the Wachowski brothers' ending but it was good story telling. Nothing "revolutionary" happened through Aang, despite the promise of "newness", of being different than all his past incarnations. Ending all bending everywhere, and stopping his own cycle of reincarnation, that would've been noteworthy. And what is up with the Pie Show Club?

My last point hardly needs making: Airbender has bad theology. I'll take it as a given that Buddhism is Hinduism fitted for export, so the Tibetan Buddhism of Aang and the Air Temple is interchangeable with the Chakra-talk of the Guru and the Spirits. I won't bore you with the comparative religion bit, only what the show says about God and the universe. Are people basically good? Aang says yes, so he won't kill a one of them. So where does evil come from? Imbalance in the universe. Of course, the much better drama of Zuko and his struggle outshines Aang's last-minute philosophizing. His evil is shaped by his heritage, but he himself did it and is responsible. He doesn't excuse himself before his uncle, only confesses. The reality of sin cannot be escaped, even my authors who disbelieve it.

There is a lot good about the show. I had a good time watching most of it with my daughter. Iroh is VERY likable and Zuko's story is compelling. Bending is an amazing idea. Hyphenated animals are cool. But the inability to get serious, the failure to grow up, the unforgivably lame ending and the untrue worldview make for a spoiled series. Let me compound my guilt in attacking this much-loved show by saying something even worse: I have more hope for M. Night S.'s legacy than the cartoon's! He is good at plot arcs, moderating triteness and "coming of age" (as opposed to static teenagehood). Of course, his theology is just as bad. He made some dumb choices in the first film (of the trilogy?) but most are salvageable. Potential success is more hopeful than past failure.

The Beginning of the End (Frame by Frame 9)

2010-07-28T22:32:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't notice, Jake is keen on flying. As Trudy's helicopter splashes through waterfall foam, he hoots and hollers with excitement. The opening voice over of the movie is about his dream of flying. The pinnacle of his achievement is getting a banshee. Flying with Trudy is a step closer to this dream.

The screeching sound we heard before is made by fascinating, blue lizard-birds. The lush, über-jungle is Jake's testing ground. Is he serious about this new persona? Does he love the blue body, but not the ecosystem that goes with it? Dr. Grace yells, "Shut 'er down!"

Some are "gonna stay a while" longer than others!

Trudy had said she was "a man short" on a gun turret and Jake had been excited to be "the man". Then she said that Quaritch was "your man" and Jake was subsumed in his model of humanity. Being "The Man" is like being Adam, the first human: every one else is his child (i.e. after his pattern). Now, as they disembark the protective helicopter, Grace is called "the man" by the bald mercenary. Who is Jake's exemplar?

The jungle is foreign to us. Scorpions and lemurs surprise us as much as they do Jake. Grace tells him to relax and he tries. But how alien are aliens!

But his playful spirit comes bubbling back to the surface. Clock-work plants are too fun not to poke!

Now the order of the impositions upon Jake is crucial. Just as the plants are hiding themselves away, the dinosaurs-with-armor come out to dance. (I know I should save these observations for the end, but I can't help it!) After Jake has "lost" the battle to save The Tree of Souls, these dinosaurs come out to save the day by smashing the mobile suit army.

After his "dance", Jake is cocky and needful of humbling. The Thanator (sounds like Greek for death, θάνατος/thanatos) crouches low before the pounce. Near the end, it crouches low to let Neytiri ride it!

This beast is better than Jake's best effort. In the end, Quaritch is more skillful and resourceful than Jake. He kills the Thanator and takes Jake's blade.

Jake is stripped of his gun, his backpack and ultimately his fear of leaping out on faith. Gasping for breath, he surfaces alone and without anyone near at hand. At the end of the movie, the "great bad guy" leaves him gasping by exposing his human body to Pandoran air.

Neytiri is watching. Her poison arrows could stop his heart in one minute. Only Divine Intervention stays his execution; Neytiri looks up (what Jake needed to do!) and SEES. What does she see? The seeds of the sacred tree, they who see Jake as more than he appears. Slowly, they will teach her to SEE more in Jake too.
She will see Jake for what he really is before the end, and her poison arrows will kill the man he has chosen not to emulate, Quaritch.

Meanwhile, the colonel's rules are ending the rescue effort. The old Jake Sully will "not make it until morning" so he better open his eyes to a new reality if he's going to survive. The punctuation of the heavenly bodies signals a transition to a dark place before the light comes.

Two New Blogs

2010-07-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

Rather than go off on extended tangents, I have created two new blogs.

Reformed Avatar (http://reformedavatar.blogspot.com) is dedicated to exposing the merits of the film, as well as digging deep to find the moral and philosophical problems with James Cameron's world therein. A lot of the literary criticism techniques I've learned to apply to the Bible come into play here (e.g. chiasms, finding meaning in throw away comments, symbolism, imagery). The film is surprisingly deep, and repays careful attention, if not in the way intended.

Reformed Death (http://reformeddeath.blogspot.com) is all about exploring the issue that lead me to Christ, death. As I've wrestled with the text of the Bible and my own experiences, I've come to the conclusion that the soul does not exist without the body. This has lead to heretical views in some quarters, so I am working out the ways of avoiding such pitfalls. Also, I am almost done watching the free philosophy class on death from Yale. I am afraid the winsome teacher could make shipwreck of the faith of some Christians, especially those who cling naively to the traditional, "Casper the friendly ghost" version of the soul-body dichotomy.

I will continue to post here as other, unrelated thoughts and conversations come up, but these two areas are dominating my thoughts at present. Please join me at these two new blogs and tell me what you think!

Hell as a Hope (Frame by Frame 8)

2010-07-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

Obviously, this movie is a long debate over identity. This is a timely issue, since an entire generation has now grown up with the chance to be someone else online, to be known by an avatar. Who is the real you? Is the insubstantial, virtual world indicative of your true self, or are you bound by space, time and birth? James Cameron attempts to have it both ways: you are free to define yourself, but you ought to be connected to the real world. Such an obvious contradiction is only possible in our post-modern, post Industrial Revolution world.

Jake's fantastic fantasy flight through the world of blue skin ends in sleep, as if his human body were a bad dream of his Na'vi self. Just like the beginning of the movie, waking up in a cramped tube is a depressing affair. The interior is not blue because it is now negative, not proleptic.

The foot fetish continues. Jake is forced to confront the fact that he is crippled in this world, not free to run. But this world has a feminine guide or guardian as well, Trudy. Like Quaritch, we hear her voice before we see her.

Just like in the first birth, Jake is put in his place, under the thumb of the System. As before, he is almost run over and someone says, "Watch it!" As you remember, in the Avatar birth sequence, it was Jake in charge, almost knocking over a mech warrior. Now we see that repeatedly negative symbol carried to its apex. The Lord of the Mobile Suits, the best of mankind, your role-model: Quaritch. "There's your man."

Making a bad guy bad is not hard these days. Just paint him as some who champions the rules.

Quaritch's initial soliloquy mentioned Hell. Now we hear Jake parroting him. This rich, fertile land whose fruits he so relished is now "just another hell hole."

Jake is being presented with the age old question: will what you've done determine who you are and what you must be? Who will Jake choice to emulate? A fellow marine, of the same 1st Recon? Someone scarred by life, but embracing that scar?

Quaritch climbs up into his mobile suit as another machine's procession concludes. These symbols of oppression are his throne and his real identity, his avatar. Like Mephistopheles making his grandest promise (either he never intends to fulfill it or he knows it will never satisfy) Quaritch must ascend to his throne before making his greatest pronouncement. Only with his unreal, machine, avatar hands does he point and promise to give Jake "real legs."

Would Jake be so stupid as to embrace such a lie? Would anyone ascent to their own damnation? Two words, from the mouth of our Hero: Hell, Yes. Ugh.

The Real Birth of Jake Sully (Frame by Frame 7)

2010-07-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

Jake has just burst forth into the light, breathed Pandoran air and staggered at the brightness of non-florescent day.

A female Na'vi says, "You ain't got no skills!" and then gets owned (at basketball). This is a foreshadowing of Neytiri calling Jake "skxawng" and yet he goes on to ride an ikran! Women play an interesting role in this movie, nurturing and supportive. Strange in the post-modern, egalitarian age, isn't it?

Be sure to cast your mind back to the same images you saw ten minutes ago! When Jake emerged from the shuttle into the light, there were two humans deriding him, like the two avatars playing b-ball. How small are the two human caught in the middle now! On the tarmac, a mobile suit told him to "Look out!". Now, in this birth, the same mobile suit tells him to "Watch out!".

This is no accident. What is the Na'vi phraseology for understanding? "I SEE you." The call for Jake to see is coming from all sides. Who's sight will he chose to see with?

The bulls-eye-framed, closed eyes, head-shot is how we first saw Jake. In the end, his real, Na'vi eyes will open. But now, relishing a run, his eyes stir under their lids, a prelude to joy.

Polyphemus and the other moons hang in the sky above Jake's head as he skid to a halt. We watch Jake's toes dig in the rich dirt.

This is a deliberate contrast with Quaritch's boots. Naturalness is delightful, while jack boots are evil. "Who did you expect?" Well ... a Marine talking about survival! Nope. We get Stanford and ponytails.

Long before he realizes it, Jake is on her side, picking her team over the fully-humans by what he delights in. "You are what you worship," we would say in Christian circles. Jake delights in the "fruit" of Grace. In a few short minutes, the cold, ugly world of Quaritch will be held up as contrast.

These three celestial bodies are herein established as an important visual punctuation in this movie. They are a kind of pause, a turning point. When you throw a ball in the air, there is a split second when it hangs motionless and weightless, floating in space like a moon in the sky. Pay attention to the transitions these shots highlight in the future.

As Jake closes his Na'vi eyes in sleep for the first time, we hear the distant sound of blue bat/bird calls: the fierce jungle awaits. Instead of plunging further into the Na'vi, blue world, we must return to the human world, for a long look into the eyes of who we do not want to become.

Philosophy of Bodies

2010-07-06T22:27:00.000-07:00

Why are Christians notorious for opposing cloning? Why are we so often vilified as against stem cell research, oblivious to how many good people's lives could be saved by such work? Why are Believers' efforts to end abortion instantly connected with Clinic Bombers and Murderers, as if proponents of other religions are not equally horrified at the practice? It is because the Christian worldview presents a complete account of the sanctity of persons, made in the image of God, with penetrating ramifications. We are vilified because these ramifications touch all areas of our modern life. Avatar highlights many of these ramifications.
Is cloning intrinsically wrong? It is better first to answer the question, What is cloning? If cloning is merely the production of another human being with the same DNA as the first, then God would have to be the inventor of cloning! The first identical twin occurred long ago in the unrecorded past, naturally. There is nothing wrong with such happenstance: God himself orchestrated it that the Nation of Israel's namesake, Jacob, should be a twin (Genesis 25:23,24), albeit fraternal, not identical. The point is, there's nothing wrong with people having the same physical makeup. The issues is what status such identity brings.

No one looks at twins and says one has the right to kill the other because he's a twin. In fact, we expect a closer level of bonding because of such similarity. But cloning means something more, something different, something worse. So I need a new heart? Clone me and take it. Is there some job I'm capable of doing but don't want to? Send a clone of me. Movies like The 6th Day and Moon have dealt well with these themes already. The technology developed in the pursuit of cloning may yield great advances, but it seems most quickly about to produce chimeras.

What is a chimera? Putting aside the mythological pictures, a chimera is modern, medical mixture of human and animal DNA. Imagine a pig with a human heart ready for transplants or a cow with four pre-lap-banded stomachs. I myself could wish there were chickens with human pancreases and kidneys for a friend of mine, if it weren't such a moral sinkhole. In Spain, apes have human rights, but what should we do with chimeras? What if someone put a human brain in a dolphin? If there is even a chance one of these has anything approaching personhood, how can we call them animals anymore?

This finally brings me around to Avatar. I'm ashamed to say it took me a dozen viewings to become disgusted, but I finally did it. What are the bodies that Jake, Norm, Grace and the others use? They are mixture of human DNA with "that of the natives". In other words, chimeras, or at best clones/fusions. Before Jake jumps into this "person", what is in their mind? Made in a test-tube six years beforehand, "he" has been growing in blue light inside a spaceship for 5 years, 9 months and 28 days. It can't have a hollow skull, since Jake must connect to it to control the body. We are forced to conclude that the "Avatar Drivers" are mental rapists, or at best thieving-puppeteers a la Being John Malkovich.
Coming back down from such polemical language, we must fault the worldview of the movie before assigning culpability. Like our present world of abortion, IVF and chimeras, Avatar assumes one can have human bodies without human souls. The gift of personhood is ours to bestow on whom we will, not innately within us as a gift of God. But given that, how can we say Jews, Blacks, Gays or anyone else will not also become Lebensunwertes Leben, "Life unworthy of Life"? The magic at the heart of the whole Avatar plot is malicious, trampling one soul to make room for another.

Frame by Frame 6

2010-07-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

Everything up to this point has been warm up. Now the film reboots and kicks it up a notch.

The blue bins of birth are revisited, but empty. The avatar bodies are out and the old shell can be discarded; the babies have left the womb and pregnancy is over. In case you had any doubts about the desirability of these 10 foot tall, blue, striped bodies, we pan longingly over their FEET!!! Feet as in walking. Feet as in no wheelchair. Feet as in no jackboots (a la Quaritch).

This is a birth Jake/we can get excited about! Like at Modern, Post-Enlightenment people, Jake is innervated by the appeal of "Freedom From" (as opposed to the ancient, Biblical idea of "Freedom To"). His entire motivation behind coming to Pandora is showing to be a version of "sticking it to the Man."

Whereas the doctor at his first "birth" was in control ("yeah, we're there, sunshine") these doctors are about to experience Jake's mastery over them. His first birth subjugating him, revealing his disability and dwarfing his human scale. This second birth liberates and fills him with existential joy (to appeal of defining himself).

A great paradox is seen as we enter the Connection for the first time: In the beginning, Jake came out of a tube into Confinement. Now, he goes into a tube to come out into Liberty.

The literary device of a chiasm is used again, an inverted parallelism to the beginning of the movie. As you remember, we flew through the jungle to land on Jakes closed eyes opening. Now, we begin on Jake's open eyes, which close, and we fly through the Connection to our Pandoran body.

Admittedly, Existentialism was started by a Christian (Søren Kierkegaard), but it is eventually selfish at heart. Jake has almost no regard for the two, poor scientists who assist him "being born". The cold realities of the wheelchair, Quaritch's boots and the businessman's faux pas ("you could step into your brother's shoes ... so to speak") are replaced by exuberant toe wiggling! Like his aborted, well-attended birth onto Pandora, all necks crane to see the light shine over an opening door into this new world of blue bodies!

Frame by Frame 5

2010-07-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

Grace is supposed to be amazing, saving or at least graceful. Instead, who comes out of tube number three but a partaker of the last, great vice of our times, a smoker.
See more images here..
Dr. Max Patel pleasantly introduces Jake to Grace, but she ignores his outstretched hand. Jake rudely did the same thing to Norm minutes ago. As lost as Jake is to his identity, Grace is sure of hers. Patel calls her "Cinderella back from the ball." Cinderella is ultimately vetted to be the person magic makes her. Unfortunately, Grace is not so lucky.

Aside from cusses and blasphemies, what is the first thing out of Grace's mouth? "What's wrong with this picture?" She just left the world of Ghosts in the Machine and Out of Body In Body experiences, and she calls this world a 'picture'? More and more, we shall see that reality and unreality matter very little, only passion for one world or another.

Someone who has plainly chosen one level of unreality over another is Parker Selfridge. He and all those around him are staring at dazzling computer screens, holograms and displays. They look only at representations of the physical world. Yet Parker's head is in the game (of golf). So much so that he chides his employee for looking at a monitor instead of his putting.

Again, we are being presented with a worldview, a way of seeing the same events as everyone else, but from a different vantage point. Is Pandora a chance for profit or a hostile world ready to eat us? Are the avatars an escape, or a "puppet show"? Is the purpose of coming here science, or harvesting Unobtainium? It should be apparent that these are false dilemmas and that Jake represents a via tertia, a third way.

Frame by Frame 4

2010-07-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

As you all know, Avatar has many reversals. We are in the midst of Sully's birth as a human, a tool of the Company. It will not be completed. But the audience doesn't know that yet. Remember, first impressions are important in this movie, as they are in real life. My this token, Jake is a flyer, and a blue person (Na'vi).

Quaritch is boots, a gun and a scar. These first three shots of him tell us who he is. He is human legs, what Jake is missing. He is a gun, what Jake used to be and what he accused the RDA mercenaries of being nothing more than. He is a scar, a physical blemish brought about by war. As we will see, he unrepentant of all three characteristics; he could fix his scar, but he chooses not to. Jake will supersede him because he outgrows his quadriplegia. But for now, he is everything Jake wants to be, and this grizzly speech is soothing to him.

"I will not succeed. Not with all of you"

Like Caiaphas in John 11:45-53, Quaritch is predicting even though he doesn't know it. Some of these people will die in a war which he wages, but the story is about Jake. Jake the Human doesn't survive: his human body dies in the end.

As an aside, it's interesting how perfectly Quaritch shows us a rare, candid portrayal of Tim Keller's definition of idolatry. There is some Hell worse than the real Hell: the worst thing possible is to be away from God's presence. Quaritch specifically says, Pandora is worse than Hell. His hatred of Nature clouds his judgment nearly totally. James Cameron would have you believe it would be better to embrace Gaia, but actually, it would be best to fling yourself on the mercies of God!

Additionally, Quaritch is a caricature of a Legalist: he cites Rules as the way to stay alive, but doesn't abide by them himself. (Nor does he stay alive!) This is just as true of the moral of this story as it is of the Colonel. Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ says "You are saved, now here are the rules." Every other worldview teaches, "Obey these rules so that you can be saved."

After having seen the better version of himself -- or at least, who he wants to be -- Jake seems lost and identity-less. Norm calls he name and he acts like he doesn't recognize it, even though Norm "knows" him (as his brother, his dead self). Jake is vague and amorphous at this stage.

We are coming full circle, back to the beginning of the movie. Jake is blue-faced again, and the "real" him is in stark clarity, while the wheel-chair bound man is a distorted reflection.

Unwittingly, James Cameron has partaken of an ancient outline pattern, common in the Ancient Near East, the chiasm:

A. Jake is a blue-faced man in a tube

B. Jake and his twin are contrasted

C. Humans are dwarfed on Pandora
C' Quaritch is complete in all the ways Jake is broken

B' Jake is mistaken for his brother (by Norm and himself)

A' Jake's avatar is a blue-faced hard-body in a tube

Norm repeatedly confuses Jake with Tom, his dead brother. "Tommy was the scientist, not me." But nebulous Jake is trying out identities, so "here he is, doing science."

The wonky camera angles are on purpose. Jake's whole demeanor screams of the round-peg-in-a-square-whole quality of this Jarhead donning a lab coat. Just like the Muscle Man outside looked at Jake and said, "That is just wrong," so Jake asks Norm, "Is this right?"

Jake eventually leaves the Mercenary persona for Quaritch to fill, and the scientist role for Grace and Norm to complete. Speaking of Grace, let's meet Jake's alternative role-model, in our next post.

Self Portrait

2010-06-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

I badly followed these instructions.

Frame by Frame 3

2010-06-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

Let's nobody be dead today!

So says the Charon of our story. You think I'm making this stuff up? The pilot tells us we are approaching "Hell's Gate" tower! As we come to the precipice of this science-obsessed, greedy, dehumanizing colony, human beings are shown as tiny ants.

I don't think it a stretch to say the mining operation is the embodiment of Modernism: scientific advancement over individual truth. Human beings are nothing special, merely the current point on an evolutionary chain. Science as god tells us we are puny, merely advanced pond scum beside an ocean of galaxies. Profit and Progress are substantial, people are not.

"One life ends, another begins." But this life we see is Industrial Age smog. Jake is eager to be born, to come into his own. Everyone cranes their necks around to see the "light at the end of the tunnel."

Is Jake stepping into a Brave New World? An Undiscovered Country? A second chance? No, just a hellish, grey town. For audience members who didn't watch the ubiquitous trailers, this is the moment when we learn that Jake is a quadriplegic.

Will his new home receive him with open arms? No. He is ridiculed as "meals on wheels" and "just wrong". More significantly, the Amplified Mobility Platform refuses to share the road with Jake. That particular machine is hereby established a the enemies, the "avatar" for inhuman technology.

Before the change of scene, we here the disembodied voice (of the Colonel) making an allusion to The Wizard of Oz, "You're not in Kansas anymore." We are over the rainbow, on another world. And now we meet the Wicked Witch.

Frame by Frame 2

2010-06-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

The movie has opened with a prolepsis of the ending, our future lives as flying Na'vi. Our hero has emerged from the womb disorientated and dreamless. The doctor says he's been in for 5 years, NINE MONTHS, and 28 days. He is ready to be born. Now we flash back in order to make our emptiness complete: our past is death.

A twin brother is not another person, it is Jake exactly. As we will see, another scientist is not what anyone needs. As Jake has said, what we need are answers, what we need is freedom. The tools of Modernism facilitate the entire operation, and are closer to the truth than primitive militarism. But Post-Modernism, with its Relativism and Communalism are all the more meaning human beings can hope for. (So says James Cameron!)
A "guy with a gun" killed Tommy for "the paper in his wallet." And yet that's exactly who Jake is: a guy with a gun (a marine) looking for cash money (to buy new legs).

Just as we see Jake for the first time as an image of his true self, so we see Pandora in reflection.

This shot establishes an important bit of 'film vocabulary' which recurs throughout the movie: Polyphemus -- writ blue and large across the sky -- and the two smaller moon are landmarks. Every time we see them taking up most of the frame, we have arrived at a new plateau in the film.

Jake is joined in his expositional narration by the two voices of the Company, RDA. One offers him the chance to "step into" the dead brother's shoes (remember, the audience doesn't know Jake is crippled yet.) The other offers him a "fresh start on a new world." We don't realize, yet, how opposite these two choices are, while actually boiling down to a unity.

The fires consumed Tommy's body with a roar, intentionally akin to the roar of the shuttle's rockets. Jake is coming down from heaven to earth, incarnating like a Hindu god.

But, like a breach birth or an abortion, he is coming out all wrong because he is coming in dead.

There Can Be Only One (Blob)

2010-06-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned how, in the opening few frames, Jake watches two blogs of liquid, floating weightless in space, merge and become one. Consciously or not, James Cameron has tipped his hand from the get-go that this is a heathen film, a movie not based on the Christian worldview. Our inherent oneness with the natural world is assumed as a presupposition, and hence, becomes our goal. Mark Driscoll has a good, popular-level message on this philosophical position:

While he cites Peter Jones, for the insight, he would've been better off referencing Van Til. Even the secular, agnostic philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said he was amazed at two things: the starry sky above and the moral law within. Not one thing, two.

Why is this important in Avatar? Jake is a human but he will become a Na'vi. Neytiri sees his human body and his avatar as interchangeable by the end, and we are meant to do the same. Jake repeatedly says he has blurred the line between dreams and reality. In Hindu theology (where the word 'avatar' comes from), all bodies -- of gods or men -- are merely avatars/incarnations of the one great spirit, Brahman, which is everyone's and everything's true identity.
Of course, this is incoherent nonsense. The universe could not have created itself because then it would've had to have existed before it existed. Personality does not arise from the impersonal, so we could not have come from mere forces. True and false statements presupposes The Truth. Morality is an immaterial part of the universe, which did not arise from amoral, material objects. The universe and God are two separate things, and one is entirely contingent upon the other.

Avatar proposes philosophical Monism, but like all Monists, it cannot deliver. Bodies are discardable sacks for the true personhood. The highest explanation of god (Ehwa) are physicalist, scientific terms, but we are supposed to believe in something other than Might-Makes-Right; we are called to a morality higher than "human beings are the summit of Evolution".
It is hard to argue with where Avatar begins, just like it is always hard to question someone else's worldview initially. However, the results -- the fruit -- always show the inconsistencies and then the absurdities. With a well done work of art, however, you must go beyond what is presented to see the whole picture.

Frame by Frame 1

2010-06-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of blog posts where I hope to go over the entire movie. Like a good novel, James Cameron has woven a tight structure into the film, where nothing is trivial and no moment is wasted.

First, there is singing, the beat of a drum.
Out of the blackness, we begin flying over the Pandoran jungle. Dramatically, the voice of our protagonist, Jake Sully, tells us these are his dreams of flying. We are in his mind, and so we are him. The black curtain which lifted was the "hole blown through the middle" of his life. And hence we are begin desolate and void, empty and ready to be filled with this movie. "Sooner or later," we wake up.

But who are we? We are an eye, a perceiver. Most noticeably, after the rich greens and greens/grays of the jungle, we are blue. Our first shot of Jake Sully is bathed in azure light, and this tell us who he really is. (There are even tubes to make sure he's breathing.) He is (and we are) really Na'vi. That is the truth, the true identity and the battle with humanity is not a battle within One, but a battle of Two.

Speaking of Two, these little guys are the first thing We as Eyes light upon: two blobs of liquid. They orbit each other in a weightless dance for a moment, and then meld into a singularity, One.

Still a species of blue, we are born, delivered out of the womb where we've had no dreams. There's even an Obstetric Doctor to tell us we've arrived.

But now we transition to a search for answer, questioning our identity (because of a twin brother). And we haven't even made it 1'42" into the film!

Look for a philosophical/theological interlude next, but then back to the movie!

What's a Presbyterian To Do with Avatar?

2010-06-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

I watch Avatar ... a lot. As in, once a week. I made a censored version to watch with my 4 and half year old daughter. But I've noticed some things, in all those viewings, so I've started a blog to share my thoughts with you. "Typology" may not be a familiar topic to those of you who don't read the Bible and Theology much, but I trust I will make myself sufficiently clear so as to be understood by all.
Here are some things you ought to have read to get what I'm saying:

The Holy Bible - This one's kind of obvious. God has set forth the pattern of human life in His Word. Period.
Something on Covenant Theology. From Gerhardus Vos to Michael Williams, somebody needs to have clued you in that the whole of Scripture operates on principles of personal interaction, dictated by God, which are both free and obligatory.
Something on Ancient Near Eastern Forms. OK, let me be honest: I'm only thinking of David Dorsey's Literary Structures of the Old Testament.
Something on Typology. Again, to be honest I am thinking of something specific, but in this case I can't whole-heartedly recommend anything. James Jordan, Peter Leithart, and the Bible Matrix are really good at this, but I'm not FV. My only other endorsement would be Patrick Fairbairn's The Typology of Scripture (available for free online it's so old.) Somehow, you need to get the point that the Bible uses pictures, types, meta-metaphors ... whatever you want to call them.

As important as all those sources all are for establishing the positive, there are a host of "bad guys", sources from the "other team", which are foundational to my understanding of the opposite realities. Before I became a Christian, the most convincing model for life I found was Zen Buddhism. Alan Watts, Chuang-Tzu and Suzuki were my primary educators. Now, however, I have found the most succinct, self-contained explanation of the matter in question in Joseph Campbell's Hero with a 1000 Faces.

Why am I so negative about these traditions? Because they teach PREMATURE ENLIGHTENMENT. What is man made for? What is our purpose? To Glorify God and Enjoy Him Forever. Put more narratively, we are meant to base our lives around God, but instead we value what He has made more than Him. Negatively, we fear some other ill more than lack of Him (the true definition of Hell). As Tim Keller would say, we have a personal Hell which we deem worse than the Actual Hell, so we appoint a Personal Savior to deliver us. All of these idols fall into a similar pattern, Campbell's Monomyth. All merely-human-heroes are summoned by whatever savior they serve to steal satisfaction from the supernatural and return it to other mere mortals. The Real Savior, Jesus Christ, is not a simple man who stole nectar from the gods, but a god-man who paid the price of our rebellion against Life and suffered the only great evil -- absence of God -- so we never have to. Avatar's usefulness exists only so far as it redounds glory from itself and onto the only hero, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Intro to Dialecticism

2010-06-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, I maintain another blog, Reformed Autism dot Blog Spot dot com. My goal is to keep posts there appropriate for people interested in my take on Autism, and how Autism contributes to or is detrimental of my Reformed thinking. This article straddles the fence between here and there, so I will paste it in both.

I am coming to terms with the fact that my Christian walk is both similar and highly unusual when contrasted with "ordinary" folk. A case in point is the role Quantum Mechanics played in the apologetical track which convinced me. In sixth grade, as part of the gifted program, I was given a copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. It has since gone to to be revised and made into a film, but for me it furbished my introduction to Quantum Theory and much of Einstein's Relativity.

A characteristic of sub-atomic particles is called spin. Spin can be thought of as the reciprocal of the number of time you have to turn something over to look the same. Turning to playing card examples, a Jack need only be rotated half a turn to look the same, so its spin is 2. An Ace, however, must go one full rotation before it looks the same, so its spin is 1. The mind-numbing starts however, when the formulas all conspire to make the vast majority of the universe (e.g. protons, neutrons, electrons) is composed of spin 1/2 particles. That is, things which need to be flipped over 2 times before they look the same. Inconceivable, right?

How about waves and particles? A wave is energy moving something else. Tides move through the ocean and sounds move through the air. Light acts like a wave, causing interference patterns when forced to pass through a double-slit experiment. But light travels through the vacuum of space, like a particle. Energy moving through a medium and a moving medium are very different things. They may seem contradictory to us, but they are not the mutually exclusive things they appear.
And so it was, when I heard the gospel articulated for the first time, someone used the language of hypostatic union, Jesus being the God-Man or the Man-God. And I had no problem with that. In fact, a simplistic God, built out of Newtonian building blocks would've seemed very suspicious to me indeed. Christ was born of a virgin, and we have no idea what that would look like. He is fully God and fully Man, not 50/50, but 100/100. And there's nothing out of the ordinary about that.

Now as I go about my Christian studies with thoughts like these strewn about my brain, I see things that confirm the fingerprint of God at subatomic and macroscopic levels, even in Scripture. Proverbs 26:4 & 5 provide the most jarring example, "Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself." and "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he by wise in his own eyes." Or Galatians 6:2 & 5, "Bear one another's burdens" and "each will have to bear his own load." The Bible never attempts to reconcile these two extremes (or any others) and never comments on the apparent tension created by these juxtapositions. Chesterton said, "A paradox is truth standing on its head to gain attention."

Hopefully, about now, you are having the sensation of holding like ends of two magnets in your hands and attempting to shove them together; the repulsion is causing a strain! A brief rumination on this fact will show that everything is like this. And yet this Biblical Pedagogy is presented without comment, something close together and sometimes far apart.

Complimentarianism is the name given to this phenomenon by Quantum Physicists, but in Christian circles, that name means 'the opposite of Egalitarianism' a relating of the sexes. The only remaining term is Dialecticism, a word which will have to be wrested from the hands of Hegel, Marx and (closer to home) Barth. But use the term we must. 'Antimonies' (Rabbi Duncan's word for it) implies actual contradiction, and in our post-modern age, that would be death.

While I attended Rob Rayburn's church for a time, a lot of this article is the re-enactment of a retreat speech he gave at Harvest OPC.

God is Not Like Us

2010-05-05T21:49:00.000-07:00

Terry Bisson wrote a very short story back in 1991, They're Made Out of Meat, originally published in OMNI magazine. You can read it here. No, I mean it: you really should read it. It's short.

Did you read it yet? OK. Good. Isn't that fantastic and awful? My mind instantly connected it to this video I had seen the other day on Vimeo:

Genesis Redux Pt. 1 from Darren Doane on Vimeo.

God made us from the dirt and breathed life into us. What kind of a God would create a universe out of such bizarre stuff as matter, and then put His Spirit into some of that stuff so that it would be in His image and likeness? The robots and characters we create -- from Data to R. Daneel Olivaw -- are like us, yet made of something else (like Wilson).
God condescends. He became meat for our sakes, and even let us -- the meat He had made -- kill His Son so that we might be reconciled to Him. Bisson's aliens share our essential qualities and would never stoop so low. God in Jesus Christ alone lifts us to the Heaven to be with Him forever.

PCA Strategic Plan

2010-04-23T20:39:00.000-07:00

Dr. Bryan Chapell, president of Covenant Theological Seminary (where I hope to attend), denominational seminary of the PCA (my denomination) has presented the Strategic Plan of Action in five, 10 minute videos. The responses have been vitriolic by the Reformed Police and generally positive by the Missional-ists. Perhaps this means the attempt to offend those at the extremes equally was unsuccessful; I don't know. As I was thinking about how to frame this for Outsiders, a very nerdy allegory came to mind.

Babylon 5 is the premiere, thought-through Science Fiction show of all time. The creator, J. Michael Straczynski, conceived the entire show before one episode was ever filmed. Hence, time-travel episodes are entirely consistent. Plot-arcs extend over years. In short, it makes Lost look like a big pile of poop.

The bad guys who turn out to be good are the Minbari. They're basically a cross between High Islamic culture and Imperial Japanese culture. They're divided into three castes: worker, warrior and religious. Their highest governing body, The Grey Council, is made up of three rulers from each caste. This is a simplistic way to indicate what is important to them.

My supposition is that the PCA is the Minbari.
The Warrior Caste is (obviously) Machen's Warrior Children. For a long time I thought this group was primarily outside of the PCA, made up of the likes of R. Scott Clark, the URC, the OPC, the Bible Presbyterians and others. I guess I read too much into the fact that Green Baggins isn't even in the denominations he writes about most. "If you don't subscribe to our view of the covenants, if you're a paedo-communion-ist, if you're a covenant-succession-ist ... you're not Reformed and you need to get out!" As if Christ is pleased about divisions in the Body.
The Religious Caste is the Missional, Emergent-sympathetic, people before doctrine crowd. Not everyone who plants a PCA church in the Acts 29 Networks is in this category. Presumedly, there are some in this group who don't listen to Driscoll or Piper. But I don't think there are any who don't revere Keller. Oh well.
The Worker Caste are all the rest. Chapell tries to make the point that they are the hurting masses. Secularization dominates their lives. Divorce cripples their witness. The children are leaving during college, and many never return. Biblical Illiteracy and Moralistic Sunday School are par for the course. They have no time for the hot topics of theology de jour, and nothing but time to suffer the ills of the theological errors de facto.

Near the end of Babylon 5, Delenn remakes the Grey Council from being 3+3+3 to being 2+2+5. That is, the Religious and the Warriors get 2 voting members and the Workers get 5. The AC talks like that is its goal, but the Warriors seem to be slighted. All the while, the average Joe in the pew suffers. Doctrine must be right and must be taught, but it cannot be an end unto itself. If we have all knowledge but not love, we might as well not begin. I do not deny there are Liberals hiding the PCA, and I want them stopped from teaching another gospel (which is no gospel). But I want other to stop teaching theology if it doesn't make you want to give a glass of cold water to those dying of thirst. But most of all, I don't want Scribes or the Pharisee's to win the PCA.

Alice

2010-04-10T11:47:00.001-07:00

I just went and saw Alice in Wonderland, by Tim Burton. I had high expectations since it knocked Avatar out of the top spot. I enjoyed it immensely, right up until the dénouement. In a highly quixotic move for this director, everything ended tied up with a neat little bow, and with all the lines of the allegory spelled out. Chances to unpack the motives of fate, freewill, feminism, leadership, responsibility and the nature of friendship were quickly and unobtrusively dismissed in favor of the stock ending, a Deus Ex Machina.
The movie was blast to see, with fantastic animation. The 3D contributed very little: moving CG character were blurs.
Tim Burton unskillfully mimicked feminist plots of 15 years ago. It's the one where marriage is unsavable, no matter the benefits ("true love" is the ONLY acceptable rationale). The gender-anarchists have tonned down that rhetoric, in favor of "women are smarter" and "pick intimacy when it suits you."
If you are prepared for the end, you can really enjoy this movie. Interesting questions about right and wrong, why and how to judge, and visual scintillation almost overcome the ending. 3/5 starts.

Wayne Grudem

2010-04-08T14:41:00.000-07:00

I have really been impressed as I make my way through Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology. I don't own the book (yet), but his lectures on iTunes are great. He really makes a fantastic case for inerrancy, even to the point of revealing places where I'd accepted liberal arguments. But as I sat listening to Chapter 6 -- where he discusses tools every believer should have for interpreting the Bible -- my dander went up. It seems as if every good instructor on how to read the Bible recommends Word Study tools, like Accordance or Libronix. If these tools are essential for every believer who wants to study God's Word seriously, then why are they proprietary and expensive?! I remain singularly motivated to work on Reformed Word dot org!

Book for Husbands

2010-03-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

Andrew Case guest blogged over on CBMW about his new book. Looks like a real gem.

Biblical Anthropology

2010-03-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm confused! I have long held that the body is your outside and the soul is your inside. There is not some "Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost-like-entity" relatively located where your skull is. But Jay Adams points out a good series of passages which support the Western traditional picture. Can anybody define -- and I mean Biblically, Hebrew and Greek -- what the body is and what the soul is? I'm feeling lost.

Video Pastors

2010-02-10T21:52:00.001-08:00

Given my limited intellect, I would be unwise to deny that there could be a valid rationale for broadcasting an über-pastor's message across multiple campuses of one church. But I feel confident that this is not it:

Driscoll's points are:

(His style is awesome because he's got a new, cool jacket every time he steps out in public.)
His flavor of Christianity is awesome because he's smack-dab in the middle between Fundamentalist wackos and Liberal Mega-Churches.
People who have opposed technology in the past have been shown to be morons.
Whitfield was the only human being ever to live who could address 30,000 people live, and it killed him. Hence amplification is okay for mere mortals.
Billy Graham went on crusades and uses television. Hence other great people should be allowed to too.
Video churches are a modern adaption, nor different than CD's, microphones or Power Point.
Church is an "experience" now, not the mere transfer of a "commodity". Failure to grok this means you are prejudiced against "technology people".
Furthermore, this shows how far we have moved on as human being, compared to Jesus' day. We do church differently now.
Going to a lot buildings is tiring. Video is easier, and hence, okay.
If unbelievers are turned away from Mars Hill because it's full, there's nowhere else for them to hear the Word.
If you try some piece of technology and it works for the parishioners, it's morally okay.
Big churches project the pastor's head on a screen anyway.
Contextualization is what goes on around the sermon, not in it.
A lot of churches are doing it.
Paul wrote to his churches, and this is like that.

I watched the whole thing, and I must say it was one of the least thought through things I've heard in a while. How can he answer the question, "Why do video preaching?" and spend zero time addressing the question, "What is preaching?" The answer comes at the half-way mark of the video, when he cites Whitfield and Graham's experiences. Driscoll totally fails to distinguish between evangelism and preaching. So, of course, he fails to distinguish between preaching and pastoring.

Also, the hubris which he assumed early in his ministry is appalling. If the church is full and you have to turn people away because of the fire code, of course you should work on a way to accommodate more. But to not have another church you could faithfully recommend for them to go to reveals a highly disfigured view of the Church Universal.

John Piper:

Piper at least gets that he needs to go and touch all his people once every three weeks. But where are the Biblical, foundational answers, "What is Church? What is Preaching? What is Pastoring?"

Please don't think I'm a hater. I love Driscoll and Piper's ministries. I'm a sycophantic, Piper fan-boy like the rest of my generation who've been delivered from vapid Arminianism. But I don't think highly enough of either of these men to say that ministry should be build around them. When they die or retire, sure their local campus pastors will step in, but will the churches last? The people came to hear Driscoll or Piper. The unspoken message in both of these videos is that their preaching is better. If you preaching is so awesome that everyone ought to hear it, get a TV/radio show and become a seminary professor. Don't pastor badly and preclude others from learning to preach to their people. Preaching, like praying, is two-way.

Mike Bullmore (and he got it from He-Can't-Remember-Who), of Sovereign Grace Ministries, defined preaching as being like old Doc Brown connecting 1.21 gigawatts of lightning to the Delorean. The preacher should be almost ripped into two by straddling the two worlds of God's Word and These People Right Here. How can you do that with people you've never met?

Making Christ Look Bad

2010-02-05T04:25:00.000-08:00

I was surprised on my last night of work to hear a gay coworker going off about Christianity. He knows I'm a Christian and aiming for seminary. The campus group at his undergrad alma mater had blocked him from knowing about a funeral of a Christian friend of his. I was saved as a non-Christian at a Christian funeral, so I was 100% sympathetic with him, and incensed at the "Christians". I almost started looking around for millstones.

Later, as I was reading Green Baggins' response to Rob Rayburn's criticism of the PCA SJC, this same coworker looked over my shoulder and asked how I could be reading that same kind of Christian-idiots who would've denied him (hearing the gospel when he was most open to it). I said I needed to know what the enemies are saying so as to be able to rebut it well. Romans 2:24 is talking about you, Lane Keister.

Milking

2009-12-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

...I read these powerful prayers with a sense of deep disappointment, for I don't live within that kind of universe. My daily activities more often feel separated from God's immanent rule and partnership with the world than involved in them. Certainly the world may seem more charged with God's glory, when, on a frosty morning on the heath, surrounded by bonny highlands, hearing the lapping of waves, one faces the side of an engorged cow. But the reality of my desk, complete with my Mac and shelves of books, is no less suffused with the presence of God, and God's creative hand is no less necessary for my work, mouse in hand, than if my hand held a cow's teat.
-Leonard Vander Zee, "Christ, Baptism and the Lord's Supper"

Post-Mill is for Republicans

2009-11-28T11:42:00.000-08:00

I'm reading That You May Prosper by Ray Sutton, since my Post-Mill friend at church gave it to me. My undecided pastor gave me David Chilton's Paradise Restored. My Bible Presbyterian friend is Post-Mill/Dominionist. All my FV guys -- who have good things to say on some issues -- are Post-Mill too! I have got to order Kim Riddlebarger's Amill book so I can stay sane!

After the eschatology video, I've been thinking a lot about it. During my Sunday School series, these topics are coming up more and more. I would love to have a better debate than Piper did, but I'm not sure how to frame the issues. Piper unintentionally set it up in a pre-mill vs a-mill way: Wilson didn't have much to say. Even before we get to A.D. 70 and Revelation 21, there are priorities which make the discussion impossible. Sutton, in his introduction, seems to assume the whole America-Is-The-New-Israel crap ab initio. He cites Roe vs. Wade and the decline of the family as repercussions of covenant infidelity. Why are these proofs? Because the U.S. is the testing ground for any theology?!?! I'm sure he would be calling me "overly spiritualizing" for not immediately looking to the realm of politics.

Can somebody set up the issue before we get to eschatology? Remember, Jeremiah's/Hebrew's New Covenant is the Covenant of Grace, and the Old Covenant is the Covenant of Works. Now-But-Not-Yet began in the Garden. Genesis 17, with its command to apply the Initiatory Rite of the Covenant Community, is part of the New Covenant. Exodus 12 and Deuteronomy 12 are clear, concise examples of New Covenant believer's children partaking in the Covenant Meal. The eschaton broke into this world back in Genesis 3:15. I'll accept that Easter was D-Day if you'll accept Gen 3:15 as Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7).

As I try to identify my presuppositions that lead inexorably towards amillenialism, I see how early I was sold on an outline of Revelation like this. My understanding of the Cross and how it was working before Christ came means I see the reign of Christ as always present. This must mean the 1,000 years of Rev. 20 refers to something that changed after the Resurrection. The ONLY two things that changed with the bodily incarnation of the Son of God was the fulfillment of MOST types and shadows of the OT, and the expansion of the people of God to an unqualified set of all nations. Only the latter of these two makes any sense in the metaphor of binding Satan.

Lastly, the reference to souls and resurrection (ἀνάστασις) in Rev. 20 comes under my non-dual anthropology (like Leithart and Dooyeweerd). Basically, the body is a person's outside and the soul is the inside. You can't have one without the other. Rev. 20 is the only place you could try to argue from that there are people on clouds right now without bodies ... and you would be in contradiction to the rest of the Bible. We die and go to be with Christ right away, like the thief on the Cross, in the first Resurrection.

Can anyone identify a better way to approach the text(s)?

Judaism Gone Wrong

2009-11-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday we prayed that the Stupak amendment would make it through the House and Senate. My friend prayed on behalf of all conservatives "Lord, we do not love this bill. But if it to pass, we pray you would keep this life-affirming portion -- this hard-won compromise -- in place." Hence, I was appalled to read this editorial by a Jew in California.
I've been really interested in Judaism lately. Have done some research on circumcision and Passover Sedars, I encountered an engaging Rabbi on YouTube and I watched an entire "Classical Reform" Jewish service from a cathedral in NYC. If I may use other senses of the word, all this great Jewish stuff has been very "evangelical".
But this editorial turned my stomach. If there are any Messianic Jews out there, wonder whether keeping the Mishna is OK, this should be the nail in the coffin. If someone can exegete Exodus 21 as being pro-choice (given Judges 13:5-7; Ps 22:10, 71:6, 139:13; Is 44:2; Jer 20:17; Hos 12:3 and so on), then they are not Biblically-minded.

Half Baptized

2009-10-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

First I should say, Peter Leithart has written an amazing book. Second, I'm not finished reading it yet. Third, I think the Federal Vision proponents are in error ... and fantastic, Christians committed to the Word of God. Caveats complete, let me say what I've actually thought!

I am desperately trying to read everything I can for my Sunday School class. I thought it wise to read the books on the sacrament by the elder of my presbytery who examines men in regards to the sacraments. As I read, I appreciated so much of what he has written. I have long struggled with Reformed Theologies Materialistic Dualism (the idea that you are a body housing a soul -- which is the real you). Leithart, quoting Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, artfully constructs a Biblical Anthropology in a few paragraphs. "I don't have a body, I am a body."

Less well done, the good doctor tackles the problem of eternity. While it is true that God created space-time, and it was good, we cannot say so now. In the eschaton, the second law of thermodynamics will not be the same, so all of Unified Field Theory must be necessarily about to be altered. Leithart rightly points out that God created time, yet stoops to enter it, but he unhelpfully binds the theologian to Biblical phraseology. The Bible is not a textbook on semiotics, so when it says "God changes his mind" and "God cannot change his mind" we are not bound to all such statements as if they were carefully orchestrated dialectics or paradoxes on par with the Trinity.

Unperturbed with that minor hiccup, I was really starting to worry as I read more and more pages. "Am I about to find myself in the Federal Vision camp? Will the uncharitable R. Scott Clark be proven right, that I am FV despite my protestations otherwise?" But, as I turned the page to chapter three, my racing heart was calmed by Peter's poorly constructed Collectivism. This turned out to be the same error he had in the temporal mechanics arena, namely, rightly asserting that the Bible use of theological vocabulary is more nuanced then Confessional language but then turning right around an using those words a different but equally specific way across a wide swath of Scripture.

Case in point: Dr. Leithart dislikes the terms visible and invisible church. He prefers historical and eschatological. Then he says the only clear-cut reference to the "body of Christ" which eschatological is Ephesians 1:23. This from the man who every other days blogs about how everything is eschatological?!? And when does "all" every mean each and every? That old fallacy! Who in Corinth though, upon receiving Paul's First Epistle, that there could not have been any among those hearing it read, who were not truly included? The doctrine of the Visible Church may be abused by the cold, calculating Systematian, but it doesn't follow that every baptized church member is the present Body of Christ.

I have lived in Collectivist societies. I know of the struggle to get such parishioners to think individually about their identity. Our society is so much the opposite it's obscene. But I can't endorse solutions which err in the other extreme. Unregenerate people can be visibly grafted into the Church, and because they are not partakers of Christ, they will be fruitless and cut off from the tree (John 15). They never partook of Christ. Bear in mind, those of you who relished such a statement, that knowing that there is an absolute decree of God is not the same as knowing the content of said decree. We do not see the heart of men and women, so we are called to rely on what we see. Yet we can draw comfort from knowing God does not waver.

I look forward to finishing the book now.

Eschatology Videos

2009-10-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

I probably will post on eschatology for the next several weeks. As busy as I am with my covenant theology class for Sunday School, I keep running into eschatology related materials and they keep sticking in my craw!

Jessica's full-preterist friend gave her a DVD by one of her friends. We sat down and watched it with kids crawling all over us. It was very slow paced and very repetitive. Also, it was highly biographical and not systematic at all. We got none of our objections addressed, only his.

So, to cleanse the palette, we watched "An Evening of Eschatology" with John Piper. He moderated a Premil prof from Southern, a independent Amil and Doug Wilson for Post-Mil. It was surprising to see how much Doug has in common with the Preterists. The Pre-mil guy reminded me of "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" many times as he affirmed a nearly-Dispensational-like extreme literalism while insisting upon his own interpretation against the historical commentators. Sam Storms was the closest to my position, but missed some obvious avenues of attack.

Overall, I would recommend the Piper video to everyone. I would've preferred Rob Rayburn for the Pre-Mil's and Kim Riddlebarger for the Amils (or me!). I'm sure I will pick individual topics to expound on in the near future.

Amazing Presbytery

2009-10-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

Who knew following the BCO could be so much fun? I sure didn't. But on Friday, after giving my Christian testimony, Bob Cassis read the form for a candidate for ministry and I was riveted to the spot. I heard every word he said like we were the only people in the room. I took my vows and he charged me to look to Christ in everything. I am now "under care" of Pacific Northwest Presbytery, in preparation for attending seminary.

Do you promise in reliance upon the grace of God to maintain a becoming Christian character, and to be diligent and faithful in making full preparation for the sacred ministry?

Do you promise to submit yourself to the proper supervision of the Presbytery in matter that concern your preparation for the minitry?