Stop Child Sex Slavery Now!

Stop Child Trafficking Now! – Slavery still exists.  Sexual exploitation of children is rampant throughout the world.  Each year, thousands of enslaved and sexually exploited children are brought into the USA!  Virtually no one in the US has been convicted of child trafficking in the last 10 years.  Get involved–your salvation may depend on it (Matt. 25:31-46; Rev. 20:11-13).

Brilliant Quips from Tom Wolfe

“In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, ‘Please God, don’t let me look poor.’  In the year 2000, they prayed, ‘Please God, don’t let me look old.’  Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled.  The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility” (Tom Wolfe,  Hooking Up, 9). 

Speaking of the literary philosophy Deconstructionism, Wolfe waxes brilliant:  “They began with the hyperdilation of a pronouncement of Nietzsche’s to the effect that there can be no absolute truth, merely many ‘truths,’ which are the tools of various groups, classes, or forces.  From this, the deconstructionists proceeded to the doctrine that language is the most insidious tool of all.  The philosopher’s duty was to deconstruct the language, expose its hidden agendas, and help save the victims of the American ‘Establishment’: women, the poor, nonwhites, homosexuals, and hardwood trees. 

“Oddly, when deconstructionists required appendectomies or bypass surgery or even a root-canal job, they never deconstructed medical or dental ‘truth,’ but went along with whatever their board-certified, profit-oriented surgeons proclaimed was the last word,” (Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up, 13).

Why We Need Christian Colleges

Dr. Steve Henderson – “Investing in Their Faith: How your teen’s college choice can impact their future” - some depressing studies show that tons of Christian kids fall away at college.

Lutheran Sanctification

Two bits from my reading diet caught my eye:

“Nevertheless we still experience sin and death within us, wrestle with them and fight against them.  You may tie a hog ever so well, but you cannot prevent it from grunting.  Thus is is with the sins in our flesh,” (Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. 1, 247).

“Precisely because the totality of the gift, the new being [the one justified by faith] knows that there is nothing to do to gain heaven.  Thus the Christian is called to the tasks of daily life in this world, for the time being.  Students, for instance, are sometimes very pious and idealistic about ‘doing something,’ and so get caught up in this or that movement ‘for good.’  It never seems to dawn on them that perhaps for the time being, at least, their calling is simply to be a good student!  It is not particularly in acts of piety that we are sanctified, but in our call to live and act as Christians” (Gerald O. Forde, ”The Lutheran View” in Christian Spirituality:  Five Views of Sanctification, ed. Donald L. Alexander, 31).

The Liberating Effect of Classical Education

“Even if all one has gained from a classical education were to be forgotten in later life, anyone trained, at least for a time, to view the world as the Greeks and Romans saw it may learn to ask pregnant questions.  And even if the ancient answers be rejected, the student—of whatever—will know what they are, and approach his own world with freshened vision, one no longer blinkered by ideology and the reigning fashion.  He would have a liberal, because liberating, education indeed.  No longer would he be be imprisoned exclusively within the velvet walls of his own world’s preoccupations and fetishes.  No longer would he be just and only a child of his own time,” (Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnasssus:  A New Apologia for Greek & Latin, 22).

Truth in Action

“Truth in action–that is wisdom, that is the Right and the Good” (John Milton Gregory, The Seven Laws of Teaching, ch. 5).

Too often, we educators simply focus on downloading information from our brains to our students’ brains.  The students then download said information onto a test, after which the information is sent to the students’ recycle bin, and the miracle of education is complete!  But, from a Christian perspective, the ultimate goal of education is to learn wisdom (Proverbs, ch. 1).  And, as John Milton Gregory writes above, wisdom is not just intellectual head-knowledge.  Wisdom is applied truth.  If Christian education doesn’t impact a student’s life, then we may question whether it is really Christian education.  Truth in action …

Is Christianity Good for the World?

You don’t want to miss this debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson.  Both men are articulate and witty.  The gloves come off!

Humble Sin In An Election Year

“For both the skeptic and the Christian, the neglect of indwelling evil stems from the same source:  the very sin overlooked.  One of Satan’s strategies is to draw our attention to evils outside of us so that sin can have its grand work unhindered where it does the most damage.  Sin is like a mastermind that gets its job done without attracting attention to itself.  It is most successful when attention is not on itself.  Sin could almost be considered humble, were it not for its corrupting abuse of virtue.

Training vs. Education

“A classical education is different in kind to the training of a technician, where the trained man demonstrates his training with a testable skill.  This, we may say, is training in the narrow sense, not an education—and many people today, without admittiting it, prefer training to education, and they must have their heart’s desire … A firm knowledge of the classical languages, history, and culture will not of itself create virtue.  It cannot shine a light into corners we have elected to keep dark, nor into those that cannot be illumined.  But this knowledge can form the mind and light a path to understanding.  For it is noble to rediscover and attend to the voices of the past.  We ignore them to our peril and to the peril of all those whom we would presume to teach.  Without a finely tuned and oft-nourished sense of the past, both near and distant, we have no culture” (Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus:  A New Apologia for Greek & Latin, 17.)

Fun Quotes from the Sixties

Quotes from the Sixties:[1]

“The final conquest of poverty is within our grasp.” – Lyndon B. Johnson
 

“God is dead and we did it for the kids.” – Abbie Hoffman
 

“I have always been attracted to those ideas that were about revolt against authority … I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos—especially activity that seems to have no meaning.  It seems to me to be the road to freedom.” – Jim Morrison

——————————————————————————–

[1] All from Cal Thomas, The Things That Matter Most, 5-6.

Pseudo-Scholarship & Opportunities to Evangelize

Darrell Bock has good observations and advice on how to deal with the all the media hype about the “latest-greatest Jesus”.  The bottom line is that all the interest in works like The Da Vinci Code and the tomb of James, “the brother of Jesus” present a wonderful opportunity to evangelize.  The problem is that most Christians don’t know enough history to combat the silliness of Hollywood or the one-sided scholarship of much Jesus research.  Tolle lege–take up those church history books and read!  The fields are ripe for a harvest!

Spiderman Theology

Now that the Spiderman triology is complete, I’ve noticed a common theme.  None of the villains in the Spiderman movies is really evil.  They all have evil thrust upon them, either by some potion, invention, dysfunctional relationship, or an accidental gun-shot.  Additionally, in the last two movies, the villains have good motives–Dr. Octupus is seeking the advancement of science and Sandman is trying to save his sick daughter.  The third movie introduces a black blob which causes people to become wicked, but it only magnifies their latent wickedness.  It’s hard to actually blame those overcome by the black blob. 

Since the third movie highlighted the problem of evil (in the form of the black blob), it had to deal with forgiveness.  I was hopeful when Peter’s Aunt gave a little sermon about revenge and forgiveness, but I should have known better.  Her advice culminated in: “forgive yourself.”  Um, okay …  Perhaps that’s why the movie ended with meaninful looks rather than an actual apology from Peter.  The only real apology came from the Sandman, but that was an apology for an accident. 

So, once again, Hollywood skirts around the problem of evil and teaches our children that evil isn’t really their problem.  They aren’t really to blame for their actions–they just need to put on a new suit.  Of course, that’s part of the answer–we need to put on the righteous robes of Jesus (or, rather, He needs to put them on us).  But, we won’t realize the need for a new suit unless we realize the depth of our own sin.  Nor can we take off the black suit, even if we’re in a church bell tower–God Himself is the only one who can take it off.

Dumbledore is Gay

There are plenty of reasons to yawn about Harry Potter books, besides the silly stuff about magic, as a recent article shows. 
 

Academic Mission Opportunity

I came across an exciting mission opportunity for academics. This organization sends Christian teachers into other countries, finding positions for them in secular universities. A quote on their home-page says it all:

“The university is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. Change the university and you change the world,” declared Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.

Prayer of Jabez–Old School

There are some moments of comfort teaching high-schoolers at large Christian school.  I recently mentioned the Prayer of Jabez book as an example of something or other … and no one knew what I was talking about.  The good news is that Christian fads are a vapor and pass away quickly.  The bad news is that there’s always a new purpose-driven fad to take its place.  Oh well, we’ll keep teaching the classics and wait for each mist to dissipate in its turn.

The Gnostic Next Door

I’m almost done reading Irenaeus’s massive Against Heresies, an exhaustive refutation of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, and a classic defense of orthodox Christian belief.  It took about a year (though I deliberately took it slow).  Some of it is quite tedious, and I often wondered if the pain was worth it.  But, Gnosticism is alive and well, from the Gospel of Thomas, to Joseph Campbell.  More surprisingly, there are actually Gnostic Catholic churches out there!  Go get a copy of Irenaus–there could be a Gnostic right next door.

Stem Cell Research and Adoption

“North Carolina proponents propose spending $10 million, a fraction of what’s been committed in some other states, but comparable to amounts spent in Illinois and Maryland.

The North Carolina bill’s supporters emphasized that only embryos a few days old that are left over from fertilization clinics could be used under the proposed state policy. Tens of thousands of cells sit in freezers and would otherwise be discarded as medical waste, supporters said.

‘This bill comes down to what to do with the embryos that are left over after in vitro fertilization,’ Gulley said. ‘Do you flush them or do you use them to find a cure for people like me?’” (Raleigh News and Observer)

One bad deed doesn’t deserve another.  This raises the question of whether we should have all these frozen children waiting to be thrown away in the first place!  The whole in vitro fertilization and “design-your-own-child” clinic travesty is a quite sad.  Why do couples spend so much money to create their “own” baby when thousands of children are suffering and dying in orphanages around the world?  American consumerism knows no limits. 

Cultures always sacrifice their children to their gods–we flush ours down the drain so that we can have our model 1.5 children who look just like us.  Good thing God doesn’t treat us that way: He adopted us even though we were disfigured and disabled by sin.  “As you did unto the least of these, you did unto me …”  

Thinking is Messy

Sometimes I wonder if the pain of the intellectual life is worth it.  But, then I was comforted by the words of one of our great thinkers: “Thinking is messy, repetitious, silly, obtuse, subject to explosions that shatter the crucible and leave darkness behind.  Then comes another flash, a new path is seen, trod, lost, broken off, and blazed anew.  It leaves the thinker dizzy as well as doubtful: he does not know what he thinks until he has thought it, or better, until he has written and riddled it with persistence akin to obsession” (Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, 433-34).

How to Break Up in a Theologically-Correct Manner

For those unfortunate enough to be dating, breaking up is a painful moment where we search for the right words to communicate finality, without hurting feelings.  Or we just hurt feelings.  It’s good to have a theologically correct answer thought out beforehand. (Courtship avoids this problem, at least if the father has a shotgun.)

Dispensational Anti-Semitism

Hal Lindsey wrote a book (which I own as a curiosity) in which he accused Theonomic Reconstructionists of anti-semitism.  The basic argument seems to be that theonomists believe the Church has replaced ethnic Israel, and this will lead to all sorts of end-of-the-world bad things.  However, I would suggest that radical Dispensationalists have a huge anti-semitic beam in their own eye.  The problem is with two verses in Matthew (23:36 and 24:34) and with the meaning of the word “generation.”

Matthew 24:34 reads: “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.”  The Greek word for generation is “genea” (genea.n).  Charles Ryrie helpfully explains this away for us: “No one living when Jesus spoke these words lived to see ‘all these things’ come to pass.  However, the Greek word can mean ‘race’ or ‘family,’ which makes good sense here; i.e., the Jewish race will be preserved, in spite of terrible persecution, until the Lord comes” (Ryrie Study Bible, Expanded Edition).   One reason for this “terrible persecution” may be slips of logic like this.  Let’s look at some of the other things Jesus said about that “generation”:

 33 You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? 34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, 35 so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. 36 Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation(ESV, emphasis mine).

The Greek word here “genea” (genea.) is the same as in 23:36.  So, did Jesus really mean that the Jewish race would be punished forever for killing the prophets from Abel to Zechariah?  Of course, we need to add the execution of the Prophet Jesus to that list.  If this is true, then why do people complain about Christians persecuting Jews throughout history?  According to Ryrie’s logic, this is simply the will of God!  Or, did the meaning of “genea” suddenly switch between chapters?  It maketh no sense.

A more sane way to read these passages, though it may appear harsh, is to say that God did indeed judge that generation of Jews in 70 AD when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.  That was it.  No further punishment needed.  Any mistreatment of Jews because they are Jews (whatever that means now, in the New Covenant) is wrong and sinful.  Period.  That generation did reject Jesus and they were judged for it.  Their house really was left desolate (Matt. 23:38).  And, of course, it makes more sense to read most of Matthew 24 as fulfilled in the 1st century.  But, that’s a much bigger point… At the least, Dispensational exegesis is not consistent with the plain meaning of Greek words.  At the worst, some Hitler wanna-be could read their exegesis and find himself a handy proof-text. 

Ascension and the Lord’s Supper

The Ascension of Christ is essential to our understanding of the Lord’s Supper.  Of course, most of what happens to us at this Table remains a mystery, but we can say a few things, given what we know about Christ.  We know that Christ is in heaven, seated at the Father’s right hand.  We also know that Jesus Christ still has a resurrection body.  Many Christians have never thought about this, but it is true.  John says that we don’t know what the resurrection will be like, but we know that we will be like Jesus (1 Jn. 3:2).  And we know that Jesus had a real body that Thomas could touch and feel.  Jesus ate and drank after his resurrection.  This table prepares us for heaven.  Revelation tells us that heaven will be the wedding feast of the Lamb.  We will eat and drink with Jesus in heaven.  We are eating and drinking with him now, in the Church.  But, we often assume heaven will be less than what we know now.  We think we’ll float around, playing harps.  But, what if heaven is an eternal banquet with tastes and pleasures that would make your mind explode now?  Perhaps, when Jesus turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana, he was bringing a little bit of heaven to earth.  Whatever heaven will be, we must guard against the gnostic heresy, which says our bodies are not important to our salvation.  Christ came to save the world, including our bodies.  In the Ascension, Christ took a human body back up to heaven.  Things have changed at the center of the universe.  We can’t go back.  A grand and glorious party is coming.  Don’t be left behind.  If you’ve been baptized, and are not under church discipline, then you are already wearing the wedding garments, and you need to come to this party.

Ascension Day

Thursday was Ascension Day.  Most of American Evangelicals do not know that.  And this is quite ironic.  We just celebrated Mothers’ Day.  Woe to you if you forgot this Most Holy Day!  Memorial Day is coming up.  Most of America has some exciting plan for Memorial Day.  Maybe a few people will actually visit the graves of our fallen soldiers.  But, Ascension Day?  Isn’t that Roman Catholic?  Well, it also happens to be one of the days the Reformers celebrated.  Ascension Day celebrates the ascension of our Lord and Savior back into heaven.  Jesus Christ was the God-Man.  He was God, who became Man, in order to take mankind back into the heavenly places with him.  You see, Jesus did not ascend alone.  As the Head of the Church, our Head ascended back into heaven.  And the location of the head affects the location of the body.  If the head is under water, the body spazzes for a while, and then dies.  But if the head is above the water, the body can be totally under water.  In the same way, if our head were still submerged in this sinful world, we would soon be shark-food.  But, since our Head is at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, we are filled with life, and we kick sharks in the face.  Where our Head is makes all the difference in this world, and the next.  So, let’s reclaim this wonderful Feast Day of the Church.  Our Lord is risen, Amen!  But the glory doesn’t stop there.  Our Lord is ascended into heaven.  Glory!  Hallelujah!  Because he ascended into heaven, we, too, will ascend into heaven.  Blessed be the name of our risen and ascended Lord.  But, we are not fit for heaven while we cling to this sinful life.  So, let us confess our remaining sins to Almighty God …

Strange Maps, etc.

How does your state fare in teaching evolution?  If you scroll down a little at strangemaps you’ll find out.  NC is right in the middle.  Must be all those Northerners movin’ in …

In my teaching, I’ve found the ESV Reverse Interlinear New Testament an invaluable resource.  The fact that it was put together by my Greek teacher at New St. Andrews is an added plus. 

Also, if you’ve ever wondered what makes a theologian great, check out Theologians with Cheerwine.  These were put together by a student of mine, who obviously doesn’t have enough homework!

 

John Chrysostom on Breast Implants

As I plod along through the church fathers, I’m continually surprised at how relevant they are.  Although much has changed since the 300s, the human heart hasn’t changed.  St. John Chrysostm’s diatribe against the hussies of his time needs to be heard today!

“He glorifies Him in the body, who does not commit adultery or fornication, who avoids gluttony and drunkenness, who does not affect a showy exterior, who makes such provision for himself as is sufficient for health only: and so the woman, who does not perfume nor paint her person, but is satisfied to be such as God made her, and adds no device of her own. For why dost thou add thy own embellishments to the work which God made? Is not His workmanship sufficient for thee? or dost thou endeavor to add grace to it, as if forsooth thou wert the better artist?  It is not for thyself, but to attract crowds of lovers, that thou thus adornest thy person, and insultest thy Creator. And do not say, “What can I do? It is no wish of my own, but I must do it for my husband. I cannot win his love except I consent to this.” God made thee beautiful, that He might be admired even in thy beauty, and not that He might be insulted. Do not therefore make Him so ill a return, but requite Him with modesty and chastity. God made thee beautiful, that He might increase the trials of thy modesty. For it is much harder for one that is lovely to be modest, than for one who has no such attractions, for which to be courted.”

Nothing New Under the Sun

A sad commentary on the times: “I see now no difference between the dress of matrons and prostitutes.” 

“Where is that happiness of married life, ever so desirable, which distinguished our earlier manners, and as the result of which for about 600 years there was not among us a single divorce?  Now, women have every member of the body heavy laden with gold; wine-bibbing is so common among them, that the kiss is never offered with their will; and as for divorce, they long for it as though it were the natural consequence of marriage.”

Sound familiar?  That’s the early Church Father, Tertullian, writing about Roman decadence in his Apology (I.vi)!

The Future is Ours (or, Why Abortion Might Be a Good Thing)

Touchstone (Nov. 06) reports that the Russian government is paying up to $10,000 to women who have a second child. Apparently, Russia is just as anti-family as the rest of Europe seems to be and is losing about 800,000 people a year. Touchstone also noted the over-abundance of males in India and China, due to the abortion of inferior female babies.

All of this is quite encouraging, from one point of view. God is not mocked, and when we reject his Law, we burn our children to Moloch. Without God the Father, who would want to be a father? And cultures that absolutize Maleness face an obvious problem!

So, the future belongs to Christians who are busy filling the earth and subduing it. At some point, the only people who will be left are Roman Catholics, Mormons, and radical Reformed folks. Perhaps we’ll have a War of the Worlds ending, where the enemy suddenly dies off due to the unexpected cancer-causing side effects of genetic experiements and the abortion holocaust.

The Perfect Post-Rapture Christmas Gift

Forget Christmas cards, here’s something really useful!  Send a card to your loved ones AFTER the Rapture!  Post-Rapture Post.com

Fat and Not Too Happy

The high school staff at Cary Christian School is reading The Revolt of the Masses.  Though written in the 30s, by a Spanish philosopher, it is surpisingly prophetic:

“But the truth is exactly the contrary; we live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.  Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself.  He feels lost amid his own abundance.  With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world to-day goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts” (44).

Black Friday

 If this weren’t so ridiculous, I’d cry.

Supreme Irony: on the day that we are supposed to give thanks, Americans were showing what they really worship.  Instead of feasting with their families, they were lining up in a consumer feeding-frenzy.  Of course, as Romans 1 shows us, the atheist begins as one who will not say “Thank You.”  Holidays replace Holy Days, and American holidays reveal what we consider holy.  The Christmas rush is too easy a target to shoot down here, but consider how most Americans spend their Sundays: lying prostrate before their household god, worshipping the idol of professional sports.  What we do on Holy Days reveals what we really worship.

The Empty Anglican Church

 

Traveling to Bristol was both exhilirating and dreadfully draining (we took all three children, which won’t happen again until they can carry their own luggage!).  The saddest part was witnessing the irrelevance of the English Church.  We attended Evensong at the cathedral, along with 10 other people, not counting the choir and clergy.  We were in an empty cathedral, filled with tombs and history, beautiful architecture and liturgy.  An empty husk of a religion.  The ironic part was that outside, on the College Green, hundreds of teens met to hang out and act out the folly of Western hedonism.  We walk by faith and not by sight, and the faith has often survived dark periods when Christians met in the catacombs or read the Scriptures in small Irish monasteries.  But, we can learn a lesson from the English church.  Small compromises, over time, lead to massive errors.  The English church is irrelevant to most of the English, and most noticeably, the youth.  As we recover the doctrines of the Reformation, and as we recover a Biblical view of education and the family, we must make sure we pass on this legacy to our children.  We can’t be so busy saving the world, that we lose our own children.  We need to reapply basic truths to ourselves daily.  Otherwise, we end up with the husk of formality, and no kernels of truth.

Mark Foley, Amish Shooting, & Tomato Hornworms

I’ve been thinking about secret sins lately.  Two events in the wider world brought the issue into high relief: Sodomite Congressman Mike Foley’s fall (due to sexually-explicit IMs to minors) and the Amish school shooting.  In both cases, secret sexual sin led to a mighty fall.  In the case of the Amish shooting, the killer suppressed his sin for years, but it finally boiled over into death.  What is a Biblical response to these tragedies? 

The Amish horror illustrates Romans 1:18-31 yet again.  Read it over with the recent events in mind.  In Foley’s case, we will hopefully see Haman hanged on his own gallows.  Foley helped push through more stringet child-protection laws, which could potentially convict him now.  He dug a pit, and now he’s fallen into it.

And I couldn’t help thinking about tomato hornworms.  Yes, there is a connection between big, yucky caterpillars and secret sins.  The medieval Christians believed the entire world of nature was full of spiritual truths, and I think we need to learn from their example.  Sin is like the eggs the wasps lay on the caterpillar: eventually it will hatch and devour us (James 1:14-15). 

Southern Culture & Sickly Education

I just finished two books helpful (I might almost say, “essential”) to understanding the plight of American culture. The first, I’ll Take My Stand is the classic Agrarian manifesto. In the last essay, Stark Young writes that we cannot, nor should we try, to recover Southern culture. But, there was much good in it that we should not jettison in our wild pursuit of modern technology, decadent fashion, and frenetic individualism.

We live in a peculiar part of the South, south of Raleigh, where the South and the North flow into each other like the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Reading this book helped me understand the virtues and weaknesses of both cultures.

Living in an area dominated by computer technologies, I found this incisive: “Motor-cars, talking pictures, the radio, labor-saving devices, possessed amazingly great potentialities for the extension and enrichment of the leisure one might devote to humane pursuits. At some point, however, one would commence to regard these things not as means, but as ends in themselves, to become dependent upon them to be one’s leisure and social activity; beyond this point it could be reasonably expected that one would only become progressively enslaved to them” (Henry Blue Kline, “A Study In Individualism”). How many people work at jobs which only exist to keep all our labor saving technology running? How many people are required to run computers which make our life “easier”?

The other book was a random find, a college text-book. Normally, I avoid text-books like CCM, but this one was quite good. It’s brief, the author’s credentials are unassailable, and he doesn’t have a Christian agenda. This is all the more interesting because his book is a history of how Americans have placed faith in schools to solve all of society’s woes. Henry J. Perkinson, in The Imperfect Panacea, demonstrates how this faith has failed throughout our history. Beyond giving a brief, but comprehensive, of American education, Perkinson also provides additional evidence for R.J. Rushdoony’s thesis in The Messianic Character of American Education.

Although Perkinson offers a post-modern answer to the problem (since there are no Ultimate Answers, the only thing we can do is teach kids to be critical thinkers), he does show that the Titanic is sinking: “But in the twenty-first century perhaps the only way Americans can shore up their lagging faith in education is to move beyond the public schools” (302).

Hauweras on Reshaping Desires

I’ve been posting on music and pop culture over at Wittenberg Hall. The entire issue boils down to the fact that aesthetic taste needs to be trained and discipled just like every other faculty in our fallen nature. Though I’m probably wrenching him completely out of context, Hauerwas says something which holds true in aesthetics: “Outside Christ and the church, you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re looking for. That’s why you need us to reshape you and your desires,” (qtd. in Byars, The Future of Protestant Worship: Beyond the Worship Wars, 23).

The Church needs to step up to the plate to reshape our aesthetic desires and stop treating pop culture moguls as the final arbiters of taste. The antithesis between belief and unbelief affects marriage, education, necklines, business practices, and music. I don’t pretend to know how all of this works out in practice, but we must grant the premise before we can begin to seen the faint glimmerings of widespread reformation and revival.

If I Were President

One can only wish our Christian president would deliver a State of the Union address like this:

“And, because these kingdoms are guilty of many sins and provocations against GOD and his SON JESUS CHRIST, as is too manifest by our present distresses and dangers, the fruits thereof; we profess and declare, before God and the world, our unfeigned desire to be humbled for our own sins, and for the sins of these kingdoms; especially that we have not, as we ought, valued the inestimable benefit of the Gospel; that we have not laboured for the purity and power thereof; and that we have not endeavoured to receive Christ in our hearts, nor to walk worthy of him in our lives; which are the causes of other sins and transgressions so much abounding among us: and our true and unfeigned purpose, desire, and endeavour, for ourselves, and all others under our power and charge, both in public and private, in all duties we owe to GOD and man, to amend our lives, and each one to go before another in the example of a real reformation; that the Lord may turn away his wrath and heavy indignation, and establish these Churches and kingdoms in truth and peace,” (excerpted from the Solemn League and Covenant, sworn by Scotland and England in the 1600s, emphasis mine).

One can only hope, pray, and confess. Reformation begins with the household of God, and we have much to confess as the Church. If the Church loses its saltiness, how can we blame the G0d-forsaking culture?

Puritans & Liberty

The Puritans thought the gospel should affect everything: “In the times that are before us as a nation, times at once of duty and of danger, we rest all our hope in the gospel of the Son of God. It was the grand peculiarity of our Puritan fathers that they held this gospel, not merely as the ground of their personal salvation, but as declaring the worth of man by the incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God, and therefore applied its principles to elevate society, to regulate education, to civilize humanity, to purify law, to reform the Church and the State, and to assert and defend liberty; in short, to mold and redeem, by its all-transforming energy, every thing that belongs to man in his individual and social relations. It was the faith of our fathers that gave us this free land in which we dwell. It is by this faith only that we can transmit to our children a free and happy, because a Christian, commonwealth,” Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, III, 735).

These words are particularly troubling as we’ve listened to the Supreme Court nomination hearings, in which “conservatives” try to pretend that our most deeply held beliefs do not determine everything we do. Liberals can have all the deeply held beliefs they want, as long as these personal beliefs line up with the agenda of the ACLU. As has been noted by many, the only thing the Preachers of Tolerance will not tolerate is someone who consistently acts upon the basis of their deeply held Christian beliefs. Of course, all this is alien to the worldview which prompted our forefathers to begin this great American experiment. They didn’t come to America for religious freedom (in the abstract); they come to America for the freedom to follow God’s Law. That, as James says, is the perfect law of liberty (2:25). The laws of the liberal establishment only lead to tyranny.

Above the World, Not In It

Christians must adopt a good-humored skepticism toward the silliness and stupidity of the sinful world. Christians, of all people, should be light-hearted, because only we know what things are truly of great weight.