Umbrella in the antumbra

As a nor'wester, I can't think of a better use for a red umbrella.

Acercarse al campo de batalla

Me acerco al campo de batalla a hurtadillas, tan silencioso como un indio, y ningún de los combatientes me oyen al golpeando del valor en mí corazón.  Lo sólo que se puede oír sobre el ruido de pelea es el estruendo de mi tanque.  «¿Dónde está la Justicia?» – dicen los heridos – «¿Por qué no acudiría para defendernos?»  Pero hoy no he acudido para quedarme, sino para llevar otro pasajero conmigo.

I approach the field of battle stealthily, as silent as an Indian, and not one of the warriors hears even the thumping of the courage in my heart.  All that can be heard over the noise of fighting is the roar of my tank.  "Where is Justice?" - say the wounded - "Why doesn't she come to defend us?"  But today I have not come near to stay, but only to take another passenger.

Blue Letter Bible: Sayings not found in Scripture

I lead a discussion group of apologetics students on Wednesday nights, talking through responses to questions and statements such as "If God is invisible, how can Man be made in his image?" or "Every charitable act is a stepping stone to heaven."  So I was joyed tonight to find this faq list of sayings not found in Scripture.  It is on the website of Blue Letter Bible, which mainly offers the Bible online with links to commentary, but because readers keep emailing them asking where to find [x] saying in the Bible, they created this faq.

I have reprinted below their analysis and response to the phrase "once saved, always saved".

First of all, slogans like "Once Saved, Always Saved" are always regrettable because they polarize an issue, causing them to be touted or denounced vehemently not on the basis of truth as truth is, but only as it is represented in the stark world of sloganeering.

Take for instance, the present slogan—Once Saved, Always Saved. This is based upon the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, but skews the doctrine by only representing a portion of its teaching. In fact, the slogan doesn't give us enough information to properly judge its merits. As well, the slogan is tautological in its simplicity, so that in being inherently true on its face, it is unable to say anything of value. One might as well say, "Once one has eternal life, he shall always have eternal life." This is obvious by the very definition of eternal life; and so, the slogan teaches us nothing of value. It is likely that this slogan (like most slogans) was created for a very particular purpose, but has long since (again, like most slogans) outgrown that purpose.

Instead, let's look at the doctrine to which the slogan makes reference.

When we speak of the perseverance of the saints, we are, in the first place, speaking not of any power within the grasp or intention of men who believe but rather of the strength of God's own redemptive and recreative work. Because men are saved by grace and not works, the sinful works of men are no great obstacle if God wishes to recreate a man into the image of his Son. The effect of Christ's blood in redemption is complete. So powerful is the blood of Christ that all sins of those that God ordains it to cover are washed in their entirety. As well, when God deems to recreate a man in the image of Christ, he begins the creative work and is faithful to complete it in his time despite the work's potential inclinations to the opposite.

When we speak of perseverance, we are really speaking of God's faithfulness rather than man's. As well, we are not speaking of any statement or decision a man could make. Part of the flaw in the slogan's respect is the preponderance of the contemporary understanding of being "saved." While salvation is a very biblical notion and Scripture does point out that man must be saved, believers too often view this as an effect of a profession of faith rather than the result of God's work of grace. The distinction is palpable. Obviously, anyone can make a profession of faith and live for a time with external evidence of the work of redemption in their lives and yet still be without the work of grace. Though, we might refer to them in our ignorance as the saved, they are anything but. Their profession and life are counterfeits of the life of the honestly saved. The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints declares that those who are of this kind were never recipients of the persevering work of God's grace, were not sealed by the Holy Spirit, and did not receive at anytime the cleansing, redemptive, and recreative work of Christ.

The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints maintains that those who overcome the world—those who abide in Christ—until they die and are taken up to heaven are the saved. They are the ones who persevere. Any who do not persevere simply were not saved for they did not experience the saving grace of God, were not conformed to the image of Christ, and were not forgiven of their sins. Therefore, it stands to reason that they as well never possessed eternal life—for eternal life is eternal.

The plain fact is that Scripture encourages believers to work in righteousness as they reflect the glory of their Lord. And Scripture offers security for those who have this work of grace alive in them. Those who claim belief but do not live righteously are persuaded to fear for their place and are invited to pursue God with all their hearts, minds, and souls that they might rest in the security of God's grace.

In light of 1 John 1:9's admonition to confess sin for faithful and just forgiveness, the question is often asked whether a true believer, unconfessed, might not be in danger of perdition. Yet, while confession of sin before God is integral to the obedient Christian life and no true Christian will go for too long in aggressive rebellion against the confession of sin, believers are always going some duration without confessing their sin. Even if it is only the time period between the sin and one's immediate regret for and confession of that sin, there is still a period of unconfessed sin. We do not believe that this unconfessed sin can keep the true child of God from receiving that which God has claimed is his inheritance and has sealed in him with the Holy Spirit. We do believe that unconfessed sin will forge a breach in one's earthly experience of the joys of heavenly life, but not that unconfessed sin can mar the surpassing grace of God. If this were so then every believer would be in danger of perdition at the time of his death for even as Christians, we recognize that we sin constantly in thought and deed.

Art museum dollar

 

A dollar bill can be high art.

Academic buzzwords

From the Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip.

Hugh Latimer: a man of words and not less deeds

From time to time, I like to dip into C.S. Lewis's book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford History of English Literature).  Here's what he says about Hugh Latimer, the greatest of the popular sort of preacher during the English Reformation.  Hugh was an English priest who converted to protestantism in 1525, was made Bishop of Worcester in 1535, and burnt at the stake in 1555.

"...there is one man of real genius still to be considered.  Hugh Latimer's character may be ambiguous or even repellent: his sermons, in their own kind, are resounding successes, 'though, to be sure, not very theological'. Latimer assents, indeed, to the doctrine of justification by faith, but he is no theologian; some of his apparent tergiversations may perhaps result from the bewilderment (even the impatience) of a 'plain man' entangled in matters above his capacity.

 

Whatever he may say (when he remembers) about faith, he is really so exclusively interested in works that not only a Papist but a Pelagian or even a good pagan could read nine-tenths of his sermons without a qualm. Nor is he a humanist: ego non calleo Graece, he professed in his final examination. He is one of the purest examples in English of the 'popular' preacher in the fullest -- if you will, the lowest -- sense of that word. He boasts himself the son of an English yeoman and works in 'the uprightly, plain Dunstable way'.  He is full of anecdotes, jibes, digression, and simple vituperation; he takes his hearers into his confidence, explains how this or that illustration came into his head, forgets himself and recalls himself: all sounds as if it were extemporaneous.

We should probably be naive if we took the style at its face value. An appearance of casualness ('I am no orator as Brutus is') is one of the rhetorician's weapons: and I suspect that everything which seems to fall by chance from Latimer's lips is consciously devised to hold the attention and undermine the resistance of the audience. He establishes intimacy with them in order to sway them. It is a well understood homiletic technique which descends to him from the Middle Ages (his method has affinities with that of Chaucer's Pardoner) and which has survived into our own days under the opprobrious names of 'straight talkism' or 'high pressure Christianity'.

Some cannot endure it. They have a right to their taste, but they must not infer from the style that Latimer is a charlatan. The spiritual cheapjack and the sincere preacher both have equal, though different, motives for wishing to arrest and control a congregation and therefore may both (if they can) adopt a manner which will certainly achieve this end. 'Young feller', said General Booth to Kipling, 'if I thought I could win one more soul to the Lord by playing the tambourine with my toes, I'd -- I'd learn how.' The only test which Latimer would admit as relevant for his sermons is their practical efficacy. And they were efficacious.

 We are told that when he preached on the duty of restitution it was not long before certain anonymous donations began to reach the king's treasury. That does not perhaps justify us in calling his work literature: but the mere strength and pith and urgency of his sentences, in that age so given to verbiage, is a literary virtue. He is as importunate as Hazlitt. He would have been a fine broadcaster."    (p. 192-194)

  Now try reading his sermon on the Armor of God.  I have to say, I love his informal style, it runs better than much 16th century writing, as I know that's the way he preached.

Jonathan Miles on the Burned-over District

Over at Midwest Christian Outreach, there's a great conclusion to a three-part series of articles on the political and philosophical origins of the culture-driven church.  Here, he talks about revivalism and the social gospel in upstate New York.  There's a range of balance that is hard to achieve in social activism... just ask Denny Hartford at Vital Signs Ministries.  It's no wonder the district in NY was called "burned-over" after all the revivals and temperance meetings.



Jonathan Miles, Revivalism in the Burned-over District part 3.

Rowan Williams on the basis for Christian ethics

Tonight at Gleaners I picked up a book by John Shelby Spong, former Anglican Bishop on New Jersey. The book was called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. Now, reading his bio on Wikipedia, I found a link to a response by Rowan Williams, who in 1998 when the article was written was Bishop of Monmouth, and now is Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams was responding to Spong's "12 theses" or statements of how the basic truths of Christianity must change or die. I always hated Rowan Williams because he ordained Gene Robinson a bishop even though he practices homosexuality. But hear him out here. Some real pastoral advice to Spong's radical unbelief.

Rowan Williams, "No Life Here - No Joy, Terror or Tears." Church Times (The Tasmanian Anglican) July 17, 1998.

Of course, if you want to misunderstand Darwin as establishing a narrative of steady spiritual or intellectual evolution, you will indeed want to say that all existing ethical standards are relative. How, then, are you going to deal with claims by this or that group that they are moving on to the next evolutionary stage? In what sense can ethics fail to be about the contests of power, if there is nothing to which we are all answerable at all times?

Of course the parameters of ethical understanding shift: but the shifts in Christian ethics on, for example, slavery, usury and contraception, have had to argue long and hard to establish that they are in some way drawing out an entailment of what is there, or honouring some fundamental principle in what is there. In other words, these changes in convention have had to show a responsibility to certain principles that continue to identify this kind of talk as still recognisably Christian talk.

It makes for hard work - as is obvious with current debates about homosexuality or nuclear war; but it is hard work because of the need to continue listening to what is said and written.

But then we discover in Spong's theses that there is, after all, a non-negotiable principle, based upon the image of God in human beings. Admirable; but what does it mean in Spong's theological world? What is the image of a 'non-theistic' God? And where, for goodness' sake, does he derive this belief about humans? It is neither scientific nor obvious.

It is, in fact, what we used to call a dogma of revealed religion. It is a painful example of the sheerly sentimental use of phraseology whose rationale depends upon a theology that is being overtly rejected. What can it be more than a rather unfairly freighted and emotive substitute for some kind of bland egalitarianism - bland because ungrounded and therefore desperately vulnerable to corruption, or defeat at the hands of a more robust ideology? It is impossible to think too often of the collapse of liberalism in 1930s Germany.

It is no great pleasure to write so negatively about a colleague from whom I, like many others, have learned. But I cannot in any way see Bishop Spong's theses as representing a defensible or even an interesting Christian future. And I want to know whether the Christian past scripture and tradition, really appears to him as empty and sterile as this text suggests.

It seems he has not found life here, and that is painful to acknowledge and to hear. Yet I see no life in what the theses suggest; nothing to educate us into talking about the Christian God in a way I can recognise: no incarnation; no adoption into intimate relation with the Source of all; no Holy Spirit. No terror. No tears.

Does he know that generations of believers have argued the need to separate hope for life after death from earthly rewards and punishments? They believe that the present and future delight of enjoying God's intimacy made all such talk irrelevant.

Does he see at all that the recognition of God's image in everyone, in such a way as to drive people to risk everything for it (Wilberforce? Dorothy Day? Desmond Tutu? Bonhoeffer? Romero?), seems persistently to come from an immersion in the dark reality of God's difference and in the uncompromising paradoxes of incarnation of the Almighty?

What am I about?

I had to write this post this week for LSH 498 at Charter Oak State College. It is the first small step toward completion of my capstone and graduation. Who doesn't need to jolt out a purpose statement like this at least once a year?

What are you about?

My name is Nathan Straub. I am 23 years old, and I have six younger sisters and one younger brother. In my free time, I am a violinist and an avid researcher. In fact, my first year of college I studied to be a paralegal.

Three years ago I volunteered as an English teacher in Taiwan; my time with the Chinese-speaking students there awakened a long-held desire to learn as much as I could about language, and to use linguistic tools to serve people from other cultures in areas like language teaching, sociolinguistic survey, or Scripture translation.

Right now I am taking Spanish as part of my concentration, and after graduation I want to learn Chinese and Hebrew. Ultimately I would love to do a doctorate in linguistics. I realize this is ambitious, especially since I will be the first in my family to graduate from college. But my family has been very supportive, especially my mom, who dropped out of Oregon College of Education to get married in 1979 and taught me at home from kindergarten through high school. My dad is very encouraging as well, and he has included me in countless discussions and projects, on the berry farm, in the cabinet shop, and during our house remodel, to teach me common sense and uncommon persistence.



What is this course about?

LSH 498 is a 5-week pass/fail course designed to guide me through the process of defending the outcomes of my concentration and crafting a proposal for a capstone project such as a senior thesis based on those outcomes.

In order to pass the course, I need to demonstrate three specific competencies in each of the five outcome areas outlined in the course policies. Competency will be assessed based on my posts on this forum and my project proposal.

I will need to identify and justify the appropriate outcomes for my concentration, explain how my concentration met those outcomes, and write a proposal that focuses the skills and knowledge I have gained through my concentration into an important project.

The proposal for the project should communicate clear goals and a realistic timetable, as well as relevance and sound methodology.



What is your concentration about?

My concentration reflects two major interests: literature and linguistics. I used the GRE Literature in English test to demonstrate my competence in literary history and analysis. Then I studied the history of the English language, and the history of the Old Testament, to provide further background in the literature I value most.

I took Spanish as a way to meet the foreign language requirement for grad school, and simply to expand the number of people and writings with which I can converse. The linguistic tools I have studied include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition.

Although I’m very interested in the history of ideas as expressed in literature, the “big picture” of culture, I feel I must earn the right to be heard in these “soft” areas by working hard at the details of linguistic description and textual analysis. For the capstone project, I hope to use these tools and background to analyze a significant historical text.

The worm turns for Marci Hamilton

Marci Hamilton, "The Election of Scott Brown, the Newfound Power of Independents, and Why the Framers Would Be Smiling" on Findlaw.com.

For someone normally hostile to my point of view, I appreciate her applause of independent voters, her invocation of the framers' intent, and her castigation of the President's hubris in relation to health insurance reform and the election of Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.

Her Face by Arthur Gorges

Sir Arthur Gorges, "Her Face" in R.S., The Phoenix Nest pp. 71-72. (London: Iohn Iackson, 1593)

I copied the image straight from Early English Books Online. There's nothing like a primary source. The cleverness of composition, how you can read each stanza top-down or left-right, and the charm of the rhyme pricked like a dart and stayed in my memory ever since I first read this lyric in the great Elizabethan anthology The Golden Hind.

Search more and you'll find more stanzas than appear in The Phoenix Nest compilation, but the matrix above is all you need to picture the beams of your love's face.

Dawkins on Information Increase

If you're interested in the information increase aspect of Intelligent Design theory, you really should examine Richard Dawkins' article "The Information Challenge". He wasn't the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford for nothing.... very clear and didactic. Follow his argument through, and you'll learn much. Things to watch out for: although his definition of information increase slips from the microgenetic level to the macro level when he speaks of natural selection, and he equates genetic information with expressed phenotype in order to reduce the argument to the familiar one of complexity increase.

Inviting Americans To Iran By Kourosh Ziabari

Inviting Americans To Iran By Kourosh Ziabari

Posted using ShareThis

Philosophical cocktail

"His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools - the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans - and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.'"

(from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett)

Mental sharpener

Findlaw.com lets you sign up for email updates on new U.S. Supreme Court decisions. They will send you messages with summaries like this. Reading through it will keep your mind sharp.

CRIMINAL LAW & PROCEDURE, HABEAS CORPUS, PER CURIAM, SENTENCING
Porter v. McCollum, No. 08–10537
In capital habeas proceedings, circuit court's order reversing a district court's grant of a habeas petition is reversed where it was objectively unreasonable for a state court to conclude that there was no reasonable probability the sentence would have been different if the sentencing judge and jury had heard the significant mitigation evidence that petitioner's counsel neither uncovered nor presented, including evidence of petitioner's mental health or mental impairment, his family background, or his military service.

La Corona
From Six Holy Sonnets by John Donne

Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise,
Weav'd in my low devout melancholie,
Thou which of good, hast, yea art treasury,
All changing unchang'd Antient of dayes;
But doe not, with a vile crowne of fraile bayes,
Reward my muses white sincerity,
But what thy thorny crowne gain'd, that give mee,
A crowne of Glory, which doth flower alwayes;
The ends crowne our workes, but thou crown'st our ends,
For, at our end begins our endlesse rest;
The first last end, now zealously possest,
With a strong sober thirst, my soul attends.
'Tis time that heart and voice be lifted high,
Salvation to all that will is nigh.

Steve Mugglin on Memorization

Daniel Staddon, the brother of a friend (Donald was my roommate in Taiwan, and Robert is Bill Gothard's assistant), recently won the National Bible Bee. (Congratulations, Daniel!) He pointed out a long, fascinating article by Steve Mugglin that gave him ideas for how to study the 1200+ verses he had to memorize.

Go read it.

Lewis on Trying our Hardest

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, "Faith (chs. 11-12).

You may remember I said that the first step towards humility was to realise that one is proud. I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself.

* * *

Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't."

Philippians 3:12

Here is an elegant translation of a verse in the ESV.

Philippians 3:18b-12
English Standard Version
(Leland Ryken, style editor)

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order

that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith --

that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,

that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

NET Bible

Not that I have already attained this — that is, I have not already been perfected — but I strive to lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus also laid hold of me.

New International Version

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

Good News Bible
(Eugene Nida, translation consultant)

I do not claim that I have already succeeded or have already become perfect. I keep striving to win the prize for which Christ Jesus has already won me to himself.

King James Version

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.

New American Standard Bible

Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.

The Message
(Eugene Peterson, author)

I'm not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me.

Leave a comment and tell me which one you think is most elegant, and what makes it so.

Lincoln's birthplace

Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin...













that he made with his own two hands.


















It just shows how big his hands were.

[This was mine, but you can read more here.]