Tombs of Granite

Risen is our Saviour this day,
Exactly like the Prophets say!

Risen I say again aloud,
He has gone up through the clouds!

Risen He is just like He said,
He has crushed the Serpent’s head!

Risen is Christ the Immanuel,
He alone will save you from Hell!

Risen our Saviour He is Lord,
The Three in One, with sharp edged sword!

Risen for His People free,
Sinners like you and me!

Rejoice, and again I say REJOICE!

Med Student meets Theologian

The Word of God is a living and active sword, not a cadaver awaiting dissection.
-Steve Schlissel

I find myself doing this all the time. In order to understand something, I take it apart, mentally or otherwise. Pulsator isn’t working right. Take it apart. Brakes wore out on the family jalopy; take it apart and fix it. Fellow Christian doesn’t believe rightly on the Decree of Providence; dismantle him… Right?
There are some things you just can’t take apart. One thing we’ve dissected ad nauseum is the Bible. For instance, who came up with the idea of Testaments? (ie, the page break between Malachi and Matthew) Chapters? Verses? References? Notes? Are they necessarily helpful? Quite simply, yes. Quite honestly, I’m not so sure.
Let’s revert back to our erring brother. We go to our handy concordance and look up all the verses with key words in it. Volia! He’s put right. So he walks down to see his Dispy friend and they start talking about the Church vs Israel. Get out the same handy concordance and, Volia! Instant Dispy. Why? Because there was no organic connection between God’s people thousands of years ago with God’s people today. All saved by Christ, all benefits of his salvation.
Another subtle overtone is the phrase ‘take it apart’. I may be stretching things here but I want to write it down whether it fits or not. If you take something apart, you do just that. You ‘take’ it.

“What if we start with the radical idea that God has given us [as his people] grace, or even the more radical idea that He’s given it to our children!”

Steve Schlissel spoke that at a Conference clarifying the Federal Vision. God has revealed and given everything He wants us to know. To us and our children.

I think many leaders in the Reformed church have the wrong (in practice) metaphor of the church. We are Christ’s bride growing and maturing, waiting for the supper of the Lamb. Not a cadaver to take apart and examine. It starts to get a little hairy when you want to put everything back together; the rigor mortis part makes it troublesome.

Holocaust and the Final Cost

Human life does not provide the standard. We must recognize God as God, and honor His law as the standard. This is the trap that many pro-lifers have fallen into, talking about the sanctity of human life. We ought to have been talking about the sanctity of God's law, and the consequent dignity of human life. If human life is sacred, then human life is the standard. But if God's law is the standard, then we must give ourselves to the study of it. Read more here.

Look! The first ever bolonga face. Author:Unknown

trains and dragons

As Owen Barfield once said to me, “The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives-they have all the works on the outside.” The works-that’s the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have comet to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species-the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective. -CS Lewis, from Surprised by Joy

Must say I never thought of bugs that hard before.

Imagination is a vague word and I must make some distinctions. It may mean the world of reverie,daydream, wishfulfilling fantasy. Of that I knew more than enough. I often pictured myself cutting a fine figure. But I must insist that this was a totally different activity from the invention of Animal-Land. Animal-Land was not (in that sense) a fantasy at all. I was not one of the characters it contained. I was its creator, not a candidate for admission to it. Invention is essentially different from reverie; if some fail to recognize the difference that is because they have not themselves experienced both. Anyone who has will understand me. In my daydreams I was training myself to be a fool; in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist. -ibid

When raising kids I think we make a false dichotomy between imaginative (read: free spirits) and disciplined (read: yes-man) children. We assume you have either one or the other. The former, though, we try to reprimand incessantly and the end product is rebellion. The latter we pat ourselves on the back and are happy of our lil’ Westminster Seminarian.
On a positive note we at least recognize that every aspect of imagination isn’t always good. I’ll use the word daydreaming. We know that’s destructive. Why? It has no creative by-product other than lazy escapism. (I wonder if our eschatological views reflect our ‘imagination’?) So in order to get rid of daydreaming we throw the baby out with the bath water. The exact type of thinking that is contrary to wisdom. How do we foster good imagination in children? Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve really only started to think about this. I suppose reading is a good start.
By the same token, because our little ones don’t draw fairies, castles, and dragons doesn’t mean they’re not imaginative. The product that’s sought after (in my estimation) is creation. Building forts, looking after rabbits, mowing the lawn, driving tractors etc can be ‘creative’.
Our Westminster Seminarians grow up to be fuss budgets. Anxious to define everything in terms of prepositions; as if life fit into a nice box.

I have long learned by experience, and that over and over again, that those who contend thus pertinaciously about terms, are really cherishing a secret poison.
-John Calvin

Jeeks and Grews

While listening to D.Wilson’s talk on Hellenization, he brought up a good question. Why was the New Testament written in Greek? Well, for the simple reason that God wanted his people to wrestle with Gnosticism. Essentially if Gnosticism is in the church, it’s because God wanted it there. We are the better for it and a sort of tertium quid develops. A people who aren’t really Hebraic or Grecian.
That last sentence is what struck me. With the call to return to a Hebraic society on the lips of most reformed, especially credenda folk, I was really taken back when he mentioned that.
Although returning coldly (or otherwise) to a hebraic form of society isn’t the answer either. You could say, “look how they turned out”. As a maturing church, I conclude, God want’s us to develop a better way to live. OT Hebrew society wasn’t the epitome of culture. It can’t be.

Smoking Squared

Spurgeon said to a Methodist critic, "If I ever find myself smoking to excess, I promise I shall quit entirely."
"What would you call smoking to excess?" the man asked.
"Why,smoking two cigars at the same time!" was the answer.

Weekend

Wisdom is presented in Proverbs as a woman: a schoolmarm, a wife, a wealthy patroness. "Many modern men do not understand women because they do not understand wisdom, and they do not understand wisdom because they do not approach her as a woman."
-Douglas Wilson

One more reason to like him. (as if it was needed)

Christ triumphed over the principalities and powers, humiliating them deeply. Christ is the archtype of all dragon-slayers, the archtype of all giant killers. As He put it, when He bound the strong man, He stripped him of all his panoply. Christ defeated the devil and made off with his armor.-ibid

Another reason.
I'm now listening to the Community Evangelical Fellowship Ministerial Conference 1999 on Poetic Ministry. You don't realize how much Greek thought pervades everything until you really sit and think. (Trying to imagine yourself separte from all things material will help) For a person as unimaginative as me, I hardly understand what these guys are saying. In a wierd way, I agree. I think. Naturally, everyone 'Reformed' comes out with guns blazin'. I've got more to say on this, but I'm too lazy to type.

You bloggin' to me! 

It's all Greek to me!

Páter hêmôn, ho 'en toîs 'ouranoîs: hagiasthêtô tò 'ónomá sou. 'Elthétô hê basileía sou. Genethétô tò thélêmá sou, hôs 'en 'ouranõi, kaì 'epì tês gês. Tòn 'árton hêmôn tòn 'epioúsion dòs hêmîn sêmeron. Kaì 'áphes hêmîn tà 'opheilêmata hêmõn, hôs kaì hêmeîs 'aphíemen toîs 'opheilétais hêmõn. Kaì mê 'eisenénkêis hêmãs 'eis peirasmón, 'allà rhûsai hêmãs 'apò toû ponêroû. Hóti soû 'estin hê basileía, kaì hê dúnamis, kaì hê dóxa 'eis toùs 'aiõnas. 'Amên.